14221
The Einstein AI Model
I shared a controversial take the other day at an event and I decided to write it down in a longer format: I’m afraid AI won't give us a compressed 21st century.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,212 posts.
14222
14223
Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo
Ian Harris explains that more than half of commonly performed surgical operations may be placebos. Adequate studies using a blinded control group are essential. Ian Harris, a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, wrote a book titled Surgery, The Ultimate Placebo. I…
14224
The Sam Bankman-Fried empire crumbled. What happened?
Shorter title: SBF, FTX, WTF?
14225
An iOS app update that annoys me
Almost a year ago I started using a delightful little iOS app called Receipt Box. It did exactly what I wanted: I could tap in an expense and a category, and the app added a geo location to the exp...
14226
Uber's crazy YOLO app rewrite, from the front seat
I've worked on many projects throughout my career as a software engineer. However, Helix - Uber's Rider app rewrite in 2016 introducing Swift and RIBs - stands as the craziest project by a margin. This is my story and some of my journal entries from the time. Prologue It's
14227
I was laid off in retaliation for anti-discrimination whistleblowing
In order to protect women, gender nonconforming folks, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community from suffering as my peers and I have, I feel ethically obligated to go public with my ex…
14228
The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem
TL;DR: I built a wifi-equipped water gun to shoot the pigeons on my balcony, controlled over the internet by a python script running openCV reading the camera image of my old iPhone. Introduction The pigeons in my backyard find particular pleasures in voiding their excrements onto my balcony. Dissatisfied with this…
14229
Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)
Good news: we have a neat, universal milestone on the journey to mastery. What that looks like, and how to use it.
14230
What sort of maths are LLMs good at?
For the sake of anyone who might read this blog post in the distant future (a month from now, say), let me mention that I am writing it a few days after OpenAI announced that it had solved ten majo…
14231
What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)
As part of my job I spend quite a lot of time scanning through files and disk contents, often in hex or filtered text view, searching for sp...
14232
The Fastest FizzBuzz Implementation
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
14233
Does your office have a library?
Let's get weird... here are some questions. These questions aren't special questions or specifically meant as only this set of questions... they are just questions that capture the spirit of 'pause and think on some stuff that you don't'. Fill in your own questions if you have better ones.
14234
Run Your Own Website
I go back and forth on running my own website. I love [working](Re Introducing First Crack.txt) [on](First Crack Release Notes 0619.txt) [First Crack](/projects.html#firstCrack), but that work can become trying. I have little time for [projects](/projects.html), and the more I spend coding, the less I [read](My…
14235
Learning C3
Learning the C3 programming language
14236
14237
AWS’s anti-competitive move hidden in plain sight
Folks have been making noises for a while that Amazon is anti-competitive in a variety of ways. I don’t disagree with the overall sentiment, but there’s one particular aspect of how AWS advantages its own offerings that I don’t see folks talking about–and strikes me as particularly egregious.
14238
A better Kubernetes from the ground up
If we were to start over from first principles, what would I do differently than k8s?
14239
From Bing to Sydney
More on Bing, particularly the Sydney personality undergirding it: interacting with Sydney has made me completely rethink what conversational AI is important for.
14240
Why most Hacktoberfest PRs are from India
A look into why most of the Hacktoberfest PRs are “manufactured” in India
14241
Predicting Google Product Shutdowns
Analyzing predictors of Google abandoning products; predicting future shutdowns
14242
On Being a Free Software Maintainer
Year is 2013. I learn about a new, alpha-quality project called “GNOME Calendar.” Intriguing.
14243
A Universe in One Line of Code with 10 PRINT
Generating a Universe with One Line of Code
14244
14245
14246
Don't Take Security Advice from SEO Experts or Psychics
As best I understand it, one of the most effective SEO things you can do is to repeat all the important words on your site down the bottom of the page. To save it from looking weird, you make the text the same colour as the background so people can'
14247
Why the Luddites Matter
Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood, His feats I but little admire I will sing the achievements of General Ludd Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire – General Ludd’s Triumph, [1] C…
14248
Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark
In 1995 Netscape partnered with Sun Microsystems to create interactive websites . Famously Brendan Eich spent only 10 days to create the first version of JavaScript - a dynamic programming language with a roughly syntactic lineage from Sun’s Java language. As a result of this partnership Sun held the trademark…
14249
Airflow's Problem
In 2022, data engineers manage forests, not trees
14250
