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What is protein folding? A brief explanation
AlphaFold from Google DeepMind is said to solve the protein folding problem. What is that, and why is it hard?
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,208 posts.
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Compiling LLMs into a MegaKernel: A path to low-latency inference
TL;DR: We developed a compiler that automatically transforms LLM inference into a single megakernel — a fused GPU kernel that performs…
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How to get your first ten customers (2013)
Preface: the assumption for this essay is that you’re building a B2B app, and you have something built but you’re having trouble getting people to pay for
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Saving 25,000 Manuals
Earlier this year, a number of kind folks told me that an esteemed seller of manuals was going to be getting out of the business. I lamented but didn’t give it much thought. As the months wen…
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No Brainer
For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull.
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Audio Decomposition – open-source seperation of music to constituent instruments
Matthew Bird Portfolio
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Mediocre Engineer's Guide to HTTPS
As a mediocre engineer, I took Internet and HTTPS communication for granted and never dove any deeper. Today we’re improving as engineers and learning a rough overview of how internet communication works, specifically focusing on HTTP and TLS.
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Deconstructing the Water Effect in Super Mario Sunshine
Note: The demos below require WebGL2 support . If you are running a browser without WebGL 2 support, user “petercooper” on Hacker News has helpfully recorded a video and GIFs and for me.
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The best things and stuff of 2014
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2014. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
Chomsky's remarks were in response to Steven Pinker's question about the success of probabilistic models trained with statistical methods. This essay is a response to Pinker and Chomsky, and will address these questions:
10362
I'm returning my Framework 16
My current laptop is an aging X1 Carbon generation 7, purchased some time in mid 2019. A few months ago a few keys of the keyboard stopped working, specifically the 5, 6, - , = and Delete keys. Sometimes I can get it working again by mashing one of them for a while, but it's not consistent. Given my past experiences…
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Zig, the Small Language
Zig programming language is new, but it's getting a well deserved attention. Can it be a good fit for small-and-simple programming tasks?
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Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests
In 51,129 comments from six knife subreddits, the 5% most brand-heavy accounts wrote 11.3% of the brand mentions in buying threads, against 7.9% expected by chance. For one brand it is 31% against 8%. The full Reddit histories of those accounts are 4.5 years old and spread over 66 subreddits, the same as a comparison…
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IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act
A follow up to The Ofcom Files. Some notes on Ofcom’s strategy to date. As many of you know, I represent the U.S. website 4chan, pro bono, in its U.S. federal lawsuit against the UK…
10366
My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer
It began with a spark—a dormant passion reignited after many years away from motorcycling. Life had steered me in different directions, away from the saddle, but something deep inside pulled me back to the thrill and freedom that only riding offers. Returning to motorcycling after such an extended hiatus was daunting…
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9999999999999999.0 – 9999999999999998.0
Note that some of the wrong answers can be fixed with various workarounds. For example Common–Lisp gives the correct answer for:
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Google search's death by a thousand cuts
Reddit communities are still private in protest of new API rules. Twitter moved beyond a login wall and is rate-limiting users. Users are frustrated but still using these sites.
10369
The Apple M1 compiles Linux 30% faster than my Intel i9
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.) It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building…
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Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry
I spent 3 years as an analyst in the reinsurance industry. During this time, I witnessed firsthand how Python is driving rapid technological change. (Goodbye, Excel!)
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“Invalid Username or Password”: a useless security measure (2014)
Login attempts fail because computer users can't remember their email or didn't input the right password. Most websites on the Internet won't tell you which one is actually incorrect.
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Modern Alternatives to PGP
Did your last Yubikey just break? Perhaps you forgot an offline backup password. Maybe you’re just tired of living like a spy and never using smartphones. Whatever it is, you’re here, and you’re finally ready to give up on PGP. That’s great! We’re here to help! No one was sending you encrypted emails anyway, so that’s…
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The decline of deviance
Where has all the weirdness gone?
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The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero
Counterintuitively, businesses, customers, and society prefer having fraud to what they'd need to do to not have it.
10378
Tools: Code Is All You Need
The solution to agentic flows was code all along.
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Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
I once thought I had traveled a unique career path. Graduating from college with a degree in computer engineering and electrical engineering I was on fire to be a manager. My dad had worked for the same electrical contractor for 30-something years and I knew everyone from the Chairman of the Board d
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Tunnel Boring Machines (2018)
Meet the Most Interesting Tunnel Boring Machines