Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,824 posts.
Meta blocking news links in Canada
For months, supporters of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, assured the government that Meta and Google were bluffing when they warned that a bill based on mandated payments for links was unworkable and they would comply with it by removing links to news from their platforms. However, what has been readily apparent for…
Advice for new software devs who've read all those other advice essays
From a person who really shouldn't be giving others advice.
I walked across Luxembourg
A hike from the west to the east of the Grand Duchy
datetime.utcnow() is now deprecated
I was going through the release notes of the new Python 3.12 version the other day, and one item caught my attention in the deprecations section:datetime.datetime’s utcnow() and utcfromtimestamp()…
Defamed by ChatGPT
Yesterday, President Joe Biden declared that “it remains to be seen” whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “dangerous.” I would beg to differ. I have been writing about th…
Non-determinism in GPT-4 is caused by Sparse MoE
It’s well-known at this point that GPT-4/GPT-3.5-turbo is non-deterministic, even at temperature=0.0. This is an odd behavior if you’re used to dense decoder-only models, where temp=0 should imply greedy sampling which should imply full determinism, because the logits for the next token should be a pure function of…
Run CLIP on iPhone to search photos
How I run CLIP (ViT-B-32) on iPhone to search the Photos album offline with Queryable: exporting Core ML text and image encoders for CLIP photo search
Clocks and Causality – Ordering Events in Distributed Systems (2022)
In distributed systems, logical clocks play a key role in the ordering of system events. What are the various logical clock designs, and how do they help with event ordering? This article answers these questions.
The networkQuality tool on macOS
Getting Started with networkQuality The networkQuality tool is a built-in tool released in macOS Monterey that can help diagnose network issues and measure network performance. In this post, we'll go over how to use the networkQuality tool and some of its key features. Running the Default Tests To
Can't be fucked: Underrated cause of tech debt
Can’t Be Fucked Aussie slang for not wanting to, or not having the energy and motivation to do something. “Man, i really can’t be fucked changing the channel, let’s just watch Springer.” - Urban Dictionary
Regex engine internals as a library
Over the last several years, I’ve rewritten Rust’s regex crate to enable better internal composition, and to make it easier to add optimizations while maintaining correctness. In the course of this rewrite I created a new crate, regex-automata , which exposes much of the regex crate internals as their own APIs for…
Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme
Amir Golestan , the 40-year-old CEO of the Charleston, S.C. based technology company Micfo LLC , has been sentenced to five years in prison for wire fraud. Golestan’s sentencing comes nearly two years after he pleaded guilty to using an elaborate network of phony companies to secure more than 735,000 Internet Protocol…
Effective Rust (2021)
A collection of specific ways to improve your use of Rust
Vale's first prototype for immutable region borrowing
Three years, two states, and one pandemic ago, I wrote about a very weird idea: what if the type system could track which data existed before a pure call, to eliminate its memory safety overhead? 0
Apple Vision
Apple Vision is incredibly compelling, first as a product, and second as far as potential use cases. What it says about society, though, is a bit more pessimistic.
Friday night’s near-disaster at JFK airport
The American plane, a 22 year old Boeing 777-200 (registration N754AN) crossed in front of the Delta jet that was in its takeoff roll. Air traffic control saw this happening and at almost the last possible moment called out to Delta to abort takeoff, out of fear the two planes would collide ("Shit! Delta 1943 cancel…
Raku: A language for gremlins
By Gremlins, For Gremlins™
Privacy friendly ESP32 smart doorbell with Home Assistant local integration
Privacy focused “smart” doorbells seem to be few and far between so I decided to build one that integrates with Home Assistant via ESPHome and is easy to build.
Why to start a startup in a bad economy (2008)
October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either…
Ruby 3.2.0 is from another dimension
I don’t know what you were doing on 25th of December 2022. I was eating pierogis, while Ruby team did some epic sh***!
The IAB loves tracking users but hates users tracking them
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is a standards development group for the advertising industry. Their members love tracking users. They want to know where you are, who you're with, what you're buying, and what you think. All so they can convince you to spend slightly more on toothpaste. Or change your…
Reclaiming the web with a personal reader
There’s a kind of zen flow that programmers unblock when they experience their software daily as an end user. There’s no better catalyst for ideas and experimentation, no better prioritization driver than having to face the bugs, annoyances, and limitations of an application first-hand.
The seven programming ur-languages (2021)
I regularly hear people asking which programming language to learn, and then reeling off a list of very similar languages (“Should I learn Java, C#, C++, Python, or Ruby?”). In response I usually tell them that it doesn’t really matter, as long as they get started. There are fundamentals behind them.
I may be the only evil (bit) user on the internet (2015)
Almost every year a joke RFC is made on April 1st (these have caught on so well, that it’s now common to see more than one of these every year), or April Fool’s Day, and some of them are pretty great. Here are some of my favourites:
Cargo airships could be big
A capital-intensive, high-risk way to revolutionize global commerce