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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,824 posts.

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2023
332

Windows on Btrfs

So for the past year and a half or so I've been using the fantastic Windows btrfs driver for easily sharing files between my Windows and Linux dualboot. The driver works great and basically fully supports everything that both operating systems could ever want (and let me tell you transparent compression and copy on…

335

Why did Google Brain exist?

This essay was originally written in December 2022 as I pondered the future of my job. I sat on it because I wasn’t sure of the optics of posting such an essay while employed by Google Brain. But then Google made my decision easier by laying me off in January. My severance check cleared, and last week, Brain and…

341

It's okay to make something nobody wants

产品看起来是给用户用的,但我觉得这可能是一种假象,它实际上更像是一种自我表达。 许多表达被不同的人创造出来,经历了自然选择后,存活下来的那一个,是用户喜欢的那个。 我的意思是,这个过程是这么发生的:你做一个东西,不是“我觉得他们可能需要这个”而做,而是“我觉得这个有点意思”而做。然后,别人在使用你的产品时,感受到了与你相同的那种感受,这时他说:“我觉得这个有点意思”。 从这个角度来说,产品就像一种情绪的存储器,作者存进去,复制一千份,用户从产品中取出来。 你不能自己不含任何情感,却期望用户使用后带有情感。 我觉得即使做了个没人想要的东西,也没关系。你唯一需要做的是确保你已经完整呈现了你的情感。…

344

CheatGPT

This week I stepped out of one world and landed in another. It started while I was marking assignments in a few of my programming courses.The quality of the code I was reading was amazing! My students were doing the sorts of things that my open source peers do: