901
Ox
“Why is it called oxtail if it’s from a cow?” I’m glad you oxed. It’s not just a load of bull. Ox is a word that, for many of us, is both familiar and strange. I grew up in ranch cou…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,824 posts.
902
Understanding large language models: A cross-section of the relevant literature
A Cross-Section of the Most Relevant Literature To Get Up to Speed
903
Using HDMI radio interference for high-speed data transfer
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
904
Git rebase, what can go wrong
git rebase: what can go wrong?
905
AWS Customers Cannot Escape IPv4
AWS will charge for IPv4 addresses but its IPv6 support lacks severely
906
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908
My favorite C compiler flags during development
The major compilers have an enormous number of knobs . Most are highly specialized, but others are generally useful even if uncommon. For warnings, the venerable -Wall -Wextra is a good start, but circumstances improve by tweaking this warning set. This article covers high-hitting development-time options in GCC…
909
The Power of Prolog
Facets of Prolog
910
The beginner's guide to overcomplicating coffee
There’s a scene in AMC’s “ Breaking Bad ” where Gail Boetticher explains to Walter White how to make the perfect cup of coffee . And it all sounds so plausible—there’s a perfect coffee, and science will magic it for us.
911
Anki-fy your life
Creating a subconscious problem-solving framework.
912
Writing an engineering strategy
Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly. If we just…
913
There’s no such thing as a tree phylogenetically (2021)
Dendronization – Evolving into a tree-like morphology. (In the style of “carcinization”.) From ‘dendro’, the ancient Greek root for tree.
914
Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces
A blog about free software and programming
915
A non-technical explanation of deep learning
This document will explain what neural networks are and how they work, which will help you understand how AI and machine learning work. In the scenario below you'll play the part of the neural network.
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917
Pushing ChatGPT's Structured Data Support to Its Limits
“Function calling” with ChatGPT is ChatGPT’s best feature since ChatGPT.
918
919
Books for Software Engineers in 2023
9 Must-Read Books for Software Engineers in 2023 — As a software engineer, staying up-to-date with the latest developments and best practices...
920
921
Please, expose your RSS
I noticed a lot of people don't have a link to their RSS feeds on their sites or have the correct metadata for auto-discovery
922
New York Times Election Day Crossword (2009)
I recently read a book called Pretty Girl In Crimson Rose (8) [1] , an autobiography interweaved with interesting stories about crosswords. ...
923
We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
( This is the text of a talk I delivered at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023. Note: early draft, contains some typos, I'll fix them next week when I get home. )
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I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
I downloaded all the posts on Bluesky as of 2023-05-01. Then I did some data analysis on the 1680399 posts from 45457 accounts.
926
TypeScript is surprisingly ok for compilers
There are two main historical trends when choosing an implementation language for something compiler-shaped.
927
What does and doesn't matter about Apple shooting their October event on iPhone
You’re somewhere on the spectrum of occasionally shooting video on your iPhone to a professional-ish video maker with some gear, and you see at the end of Apple’s October “Scary Fast” event announcing new Macs with M3 silicon that the entire event was “Shot on iPhone.”
928
Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS
Are there any other hardcoded folder names in macOS? Where would I even start looking?
929
What happened to Vivaldi Social?
A deep dive into the events of Saturday 8 July 2023, when user accounts started disappearing from the Vivaldi Social Mastodon instance.
930
"Attention", "Transformers", in Neural Network "Large Language Models"
I find this literature irritating and opaque. This is at least somewhat because I do not yet understand it well, and there's too much of it. But clearly I need to wrap my head around it, before I become technically obsolete. My scare quotes in the title of these notes thus derive in part from jealousy and fear. But…