4021
Boring tech is mature, not old
Talking about my description of tech as “boring” to be a compliment, and how to think about it.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,191 posts.
4022
The Lost Art of Research as Leisure
Where have the amateur researchers gone, and how do we bring them back?
4023
4024
Everyone should read support emails
A company can learn more from people sharing their experiences than from numbers in a spreadsheet
4025
Who won the Amstel Gold Race? Human error in photo-finishes
Investigating the photo-finish of last Sunday's Amstel Gold Race. With millimeters separating the two riders does the photo-finish camera tell the truth?
4026
4027
How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster
This is the fascinating story of how researchers used Bloom filters cleverly to make SQLite 10x faster for analytical queries. These are my five-minute notes on the paper SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
4028
End-to-end implementation of a machine learning pipeline (2017)
In the fall of 2016, I was a Teaching Fellow (Harvard's version of TA) for the graduate class on "Advanced Topics in Data Science (CS209/109)" at Harvard University. I was in-charge of designing the class project given to the students, and this tutorial has been built on top of the project I designed for the class.
4029
65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform
Sentiment analysis of 32,000 Hacker News posts shows 65% skew negative and earn 27% more points. Six transformer and LLM models tested, full data included.
4030
4031
RePalm
Dmitry.GR: PalmOS on new hardware!
4032
The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
Ello launched in 2014 with big dreams, but the artsy social network suddenly shut down last year, deleting nine years of posts without warning. What happened?
4033
4034
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…
4035
How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?
A technical investigation into information uncovered in a class action lawsuit that Facebook had intercepted encrypted traffic from user's devices running the Onavo Protect app in order to gain competitive insights.
4036
Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat?
The biggest announcement from last week’s OpenAI DevDay (and there were a LOT of announcements) was GPTs. Users of ChatGPT Plus can now create their own, custom GPT chat bots …
4037
Open secrets about Hacker News
I spent a few days examining the mechanics of Hacker News (HN) and I discovered some open secrets. “Open” because they’re not private. …
4038
4039
4040
Why the Bootstrap 3 Grid Works (2013)
Expired Registration Recovery Policy
4041
My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown
How My Mindfulness Practice Lead Me To Meltdown
4042
Shaving is an example of how consumer products extract more money
Shaving is too expensive and is a demonstrative example of how most consumer products are designed to extract more money from you rather than to improve your life, or the world, or to be in any way remotely good.
4043
4044
Uv's killer feature is making ad-hoc environments easy
uv run - install, activate, and run in one command…
4045
Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
I think it is healthy to compare historical and modern computing. Let's see how the CPUs contained in recent USB-C wall chargers compare to the power of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC). The Apollo 11 spacecraft carried 3 humans to the moon and back in 1969.
4046
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…
4047
But Where Do People Work in This Office?
Matt Blodgett on topics occasionally germane to software development.
4048
12 Months of Mandarin
Estimates for achieving intermediate fluency in Mandarin Chinese range up to spending years and around 4000 total hours (2,200h classroom hours, 1,800 outside). I did it in 1500 hours total and less than a year.[1] 1. There is a lot of disagreement on language proficiency estimates. They
4049
Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z
If you want €:\, you can have it, sort of
4050
Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production
Docker’s momentum has been increasing by the week, and from that it’s clearly touching on real problems. However, for many production users today, the pros do not outweigh the cons. Docker has done fantastically well at making containers appeal to developers for development, testing and CI environments—however, it has…