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Seven basic rules for causal inference
Personal website of Dr. Peder M. Isager
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
1412
The Hearts of the Super Nintendo
When I start studying a vintage system, the first thing I like to do is understand how its components work together at the hardware level [1] .
1413
Passwordless: a different kind of hell?
It's no secret that authenticating into services is an unresolved topic. With time, we have managed
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I can't use my number pad for 2FA codes
This has to be the most infuriating bug report I've ever submitted. I went to type in my 2FA code on a website - but no numbers appeared on screen. Obviously, I was an idiot and had forgotten to press the NumLock button. D'oh! I toggled it on and typed again. No numbers appeared. I switched to another tab, my numbers…
1416
Lowercase letters save data
Lowercase letters and uppercase letters use the same amout of data — 1 byte each.
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General Theory of Neural Networks
From gene regulatory networks to artificial neural networks
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C23: A Slightly Better C
One of the established and most popular programming languages is the C programming language. It is relatively easy to learn, and highly practical. Maybe surprisingly, the C programming language keeps evolving, slowly and carefully. If you have GCC 13 or LLVM (Clang) 16, you already have a compiler with some of the…
1420
Stop saying "just" (2019)
Do you work in Software Engineering, and have you seen messages or sentences like these before?
1421
SQL is syntactic sugar for relational algebra
This idea is particularly sticky because it was more or less true 50 years ago, and it's a passable mental model to use when learning sql. But it's an inadequate mental model for building new sql frontends, designing new query languages, or writing tools likes ORMs that abstract over sql.
1422
Reverse-Engineering an IP Camera (2019)
A few days ago I had to replace the old IP camera I use to watch over my dogs and cats, and found out that IP cam technology changed a lot since I bought that old camera. IP cameras are now low-price and ubiquitous. I bought one of those generic models and installed it at my home, expecting to use the same software…
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The best darn grid shader yet (2023)
For as long as I’ve been writing shaders, there’s been one specific shader I’ve always tried to write…
1425
The business of check cashing
Check cashing, as a business, is a poorly understood "alternative" financial service.
1426
How LLMs Work, Explained Without Math
I'm sure you agree that it has become impossible to ignore Generative AI (GenAI), as we are constantly bombarded with mainstream news about Large Language Models (LLMs). Very likely you have tried…
1427
How and why to make a /now page on your site
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
1428
Diatom Arrangements
An odd post. Diatoms are single-celled algae with glass shells, and people arrange them into patterns under a microscope.
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Sonic Pi: Ruby as a Composition Tool
Like the blip of an intro on the front page says, my degree was originally in music. My running joke as a web dev is that neither has meaningfully required me to count past 32. And while my main concentration was vocals, I've since realized I should probably stop strictly calling this a nontechnical field, because my…
1432
Kenya and "the decline of the greatest coffee" (2021)
During one of his “yes or no” Instagram Q&As, Scott Rao lamented the declining quality of Kenyan coffees over the last three years—a sentiment I’ve heard echoed by buyers across Europe, the US, and Australia. He kicked a different question over to me about whether cultivar or microclimate or process has the greatest…
1433
AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training
👯 On training my own AI to steal illustrators’ styles
1434
A lesson in dockerizing shell scripts
My learnings from publishing my first ever Dockerfile for ugit (a shell script based tool to undo git command) and writing the most optimized dockerfile for it.
1435
New 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings
Raspberry Pi launched the 2 gig Pi 5 for $50, and besides half the RAM and a lower price, it has a new stepping of the main BCM2712 chip. This is the BCM2712 D0 stepping. Older Pi 5's shipped with a C1. In their blog post, they said: The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the…
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A transport protocol's view of Starlink
Digital communications systems always represent a collection of design trade-offs. Maximising one characteristic of a system may impair others, and various communications services may chose to optimise different performance parameters based on the intersection these design decisions with the physical characteristics…
1437
Diffusion Forcing: Next-Token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion
Official Website of Diffusion Forcing
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Notion's mid-life crisis
Notion sat down on the curb, crushed his cigarette into the pavement, put his face into his hands, and sobbed. It felt good to finally let i...
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Fear makes you a worse programmer (2014)
Fear makes you a worse programmer