811
Building a USB SNES Controller
A few years ago on a trip to Tokyo, we took a day to explore Akihabara. We found a shop that was selling retro gaming stuff and when I saw an old SNES controller for sale I had to buy it.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
812
D&D is Anti-Medieval
You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…
813
Debian KDE: Right Linux distribution for professional digital painting in 2024
Fig0. Photo of my workplace, my cat Noutti (my main inspiration for Carrot) says hello!
814
The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise
"You’ve taken this idea way too far," a mentor told Prof. Fei-Fei Li.
815
OpenID Connect specifications published as ISO standards
I’m thrilled to report that the OpenID Connect specifications have now been published as ISO/IEC standards. They are:
816
The Truth About Linear Regression (2015)
This is basically a compilation of the lecture notes I wrote when teaching 36-401, Modern Regression, in fall 2015 . I offer it here on the chance that it might be of interest to those learning, or teaching, linear regression. There's no shortage of resources on that, but I have tried to present the subject as though…
817
The server chose violence
Hubris's oddest syscall
818
Most people don't care about quality
My friend, the photographer Paul Clarke has an uncanny eye for detail. Every single shot he publishes is beautiful - they capture life in a way that I don't have the language to describe. I'm quite content to point my phone at someone, use the default settings, and grab a snap. My photos lack composition, clarity…
819
Understanding the BM25 full text search algorithm
BM25 is a widely used algorithm for full text search. I wanted to understand how it works, so here is my attempt at understanding by re-explaining.
820
821
822
Kate editor on all platforms
Unix like systems with X11 or Wayland All Unix like systems with either X11 or Wayland are well supported since ever. Linux with X11 and now Wayland is for a long time the primary system on that Kate work happens. Over the years it was, like most of the KDE applications, ported to various BSD variants. Be it some…
823
824
Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper
Recently, GDM released a great paper titled, Scaling Exponents Across Parameterizations and Optimizers, in which they conduct over 10,000 LLM training runs to obtain optimal hyperparameters under different regimes. After reading it (it was great), I wanted to test my understanding of the paper by tallying up all…
825
Stack Overflow users deleting answers after OpenAI partnership
In this ever changing and evolving world of user generated versus AI generated content, the recent announcement of Stack Overflow partnering with OpenAI recently has been met with some backlash by …
826
827
C Macro Reflection in Zig
Zig’s reflection combined with Zig’s ability to import C header files means Zig can be used for C macro reflection.
828
BB(3, 4) > Ack(14)
Pavel has found a new 3-state 4-symbol Busy Beaver champion which can compute an “Ackermann-level” function and halts with exactly
829
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
There is a new clear best (non-tiny) LLM.
830
Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
How Machine-Readable Clinical Guidelines Can Help Standardize Cancer Care
831
Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in the browser
I attended the Story Discovery At Scale data journalism conference at Stanford this week. One of the perennial hot topics at any journalism conference concerns data extraction: how can we …
832
Browsers are the most likely disruptor of the mobile duopoly
Under regulatory pressure, mobile OSes are opening up and adding features that will allow PWAs to disrupt app stores ... Yet with shockingly few exceptions, coverage accepts that the solution to crummy, extractive native app stores will be other native app stores. ... The press fails to mention the web as a sustitute…
833
Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley
A demonstration of power by Silicon Valley’s top startup accelerator.
834
Cognition: A new antisyntax language redefining metaprogramming
Other languages are inflexible and broken. Let's fix that.
835
Making my own wedding rings
I’m getting married pretty soon, and I figured it’d be fun to make my own rings. I’d seen a Nile Red video where he made purple gold, and the process seemed simple enough: Make a mold, pour some mol…
836
Why isn't the <html> element 100% supported on caniuse.com?
I saw a Mastodon post that made me laugh this morning. It seemed sort of crazy that the html element wouldn’t have 100% support on CanIUse.com. Heck, I’ve been using it since 1994 and it worked just fine back then! This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole.
837
The Mafia of Pharma Pricing
4% of all the money in America flows through a few mafia-like health care conglomerates. The FTC just released a ground-breaking report on how they operate. And it is gearing up to sue.
838
The lost language extensions of MetaWare's High C compiler (2023)
This book I got in a pile of FM TOWNS books turns out to be a lot more interesting that I was expecting an '80s C compiler manual to be. For as long as C and its relatives have been in mainstream use,…
839
Ten years of improvements in PostgreSQL's optimizer
Ryan Marcus, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Using machine learning to build the next generation of data systems.
840
Seconds Since the Epoch
This is not at all news, but it comes up often enough that I think there should be a concise explanation of the problem. People, myself included, like to say that POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch , which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00.