931
Detecting when LLMs are uncertain
A deep dive into a new reasoning technique called Entropix.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
932
Game Programming in Prolog
This article explains how a game can be made in Prolog by leveraging the hidden power of logic programming. Inspired by the elegance of data-driven design and declarative programming paradigms, I will be explaining a new way of designing game rules which can at the same time be used as the source code of the gameplay…
933
Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers
Airlines use up to four digits for flight numbers. That means they can have up to 9,999 flights (since there’s no flight zero), and no one comes close. American Airlines operates around 6,700 daily flights including its American Eagle regional services. So they should have plenty of room to grow! Except they don’t…
934
Intel N100 Radxa X4 First Thoughts
The Intel N100-based Radxa x4 has taken the headlines over the last week or so, and for good reason! Does the x86 SBC live up to the hype?
935
Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech
The lofty theory and the sordid reality of "perf".
936
The simple beauty of XOR floating point compression
I recently implemented a small program to visualize the inner workings of a scheme that compresses floating point timeseries by XORing subsequent values. The resulting visualizations are quite neat…
937
Exponentially Better Rotations (2022)
If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.
938
How Python asyncio works: recreating it from scratch
Learn how asyncio works by recreating it from scratch with Python generators and using the __await__ dunder method for the async/await keywords.
939
Notes on El Salvador
In 1995, El Salvador had an intentional homicide rate of 139 per 100,000, the highest in the world and one of the highest rates recorded in modern history. Like all educated middle-class Americans,…
940
Programming Zero Knowledge Proofs: From Zero to Hero
Learn to write and modify Zero Knowledge Proofs from scratch. You'll build a digital signature scheme using hash-based commitments, gaining practical ZKP programming skills and intuition along the way. By the end, you'll have all the tools you need to implement things like group signatures.
941
Yes, we did discover the Higgs
Ben Recht got my attention with a tweet about his blog post "The Higgs discovery did not take place.” I’m generally a fan of Ben’s writing, but I think he’s off base on a number of issues, and I’ll explain why. [Updated Oct 23rd, 2024] Ben's …
942
Postgres is eating the database world
PostgreSQL isn’t just a simple relational database; it’s a data management framework with the potential to engulf the entire database…
943
A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled Copyleft Trolls (2022)
Copyleft trolls, robosigning, and Pixsy.
944
A BSD person tries Alpine Linux
By Ruben Schade in Eora/Sydney, Australia.
945
Against Best Practices
I have come to believe that by and large “best practices” are doing more harm than good. Not necessarily because they’re bad advice as such, but because they’re mostly pounded by either 1) various types of zealots, idiots, and assholes who abuse these kind of “best practices” as an argument from authority, or 2)…
946
IPMI
I am making steady progress towards moving the Computers Are Bad enterprise cloud to its new home, here in New Mexico. One of the steps in this process is, of course, purchasing a new server... the current Big Iron is getting rather old (probably about a decade!) and here in town I'll have the rack space for more…
947
On the nature of computing science (1984)
Now this summer school draws to a close, it seems appropriate to try to put its topic into some perspective
948
LSP: The good, the bad, and the ugly
For a few years now I have been working on the Haskell Language Server (HLS), and the lsp library for the LSP protocol and writing LSP servers. Unsurprisingly, I have developed some opinions about the design of the LSP! Recently I gave a talk about HLS and LSP at the Haskell Ecosystem Workshop at Zurihac 2024. One…
949
Apple curl security incident 12604
tldr: Apple thinks it is fine. I do not. On December 28 2023, bugreport 12604 was filed in the curl issue tracker. We get a lot issues filed most days so this fact alone was hardly anything out of the ordinary. We read the reports, investigate, ask follow-up questions to see what we can learn … Continue reading the…
950
Direct pixel-space megapixel image generation with diffusion models
Scalable high-resolution (megapixel) pixel-space image synthesis.
951
Dear Europe, please wake up
Europe is special to me as I consider myself a proud European, but damn we need to talk. Europe please wake up.
952
Why can't my mom email me?
Proton email keeps sending my non-Proton email accounts encrypted emails. I figure out why and show you how to turn it off.
953
Understanding and avoiding visually ambiguous characters in IDs
Designing a dictionary of visually unambiguous characters for IDs.
954
Lesser known parts of Python standard library
Code level discussion of web scraping, gray hat automation, growth hacking and bounty hunting
955
Mamba: The Easy Way
An overview of the big ideas behind Mamba, a brand-new language model architecture.
956
The AI Investment Boom
AI Demand is Driving Skyrocketing US Investment in Computers, Data Centers, and Other Physical Infrastructure
957
Web components are okay
Every so often, the web development community gets into a tizzy about something, usually web components. I find these fights tiresome, but I also see them as a…
958
The world has probably passed peak pollution
Millions die prematurely from local air pollution, but we can reduce this number significantly.
959
A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
Taking a look at a16z’s blog posts.
960
My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack
A few years ago, my cat gave me my most memorable middle of the night software engineering incident. I was working at a startup, and we didn’t have a formal on-call rotation yet. That was a deliberate decision, since being on-call is painful, and the team was good about just collectively keeping an eye out for urgent…