1441
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,178 posts.
1442
The First Rule of Machine Learning: Start Without Machine Learning
Why this is the first rule, some baseline heuristics, and when to move on to machine learning.
1443
ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com. The value is while you are on ChatGPT and tied to your ChatGPT account. __obi is then sent to OpenAI from ordinary websites you visit. Any company that buys ads on ChatGPT installs
1444
Mercury Spill
On July 1st I discovered a puddle of liquid mercury in our house. It was the evening before the holiday weekend and I was preparing to do some more demolition for the bathroom I've been working on. I was putting down plastic to make cleanup easier, and when I got to the corner there was a dusty little puddle. That…
1445
Willingness to look stupid
Looking foolish is underrated.
1446
Pixels don’t care
There's plenty of discrimination and intolerance in our world, but never forget that pixels don't care.
1447
The Google Willow Thing
Yesterday I arrived in Santa Clara for the Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) conference, which starts this morning, and where I’ll be speaking Thursday on “Quantum Algorithms in 2024: How Should…
1448
See what JavaScript commands get injected through an in-app browser
I work with U.S. law firms as a non-testifying technical consulting expert on matters involving the Apple platform and iOS apps. Learn more about my litigation consulting.
1449
How to build a personal webpage from scratch
An opinionated introduction to designing and deploying a modern static webpage.
1450
1451
Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
We spent years working on this game. We're betting our family's future on it. So. Why does it look so bad? We've been writing indie game...
1452
Git undo: We can do better
Update for future readers: Are you looking for a way to undo something with Git? The git undo command won’t help with your current issue (it needs to be inst...
1453
If you opened your PayPal account before you were 18, close it
Everyone knows a horror story about PayPal, I’ve had several painful experiences with them over the last decade, but now I’ll never have to…
1454
Choose Postgres queue technology
Introduction Postgres queue tech is a thing of beauty, but far from mainstream. Its relative obscurity is partially attributable to the cargo cult of “scale”. The scalability cult has decreed that there are several queue technologies with greater “scalability” than Postgres, and for that reason alone, Postgres isn’t…
1455
Awk in 20 Minutes (2015)
Awk is a tiny programming language and a command line tool. It's particularly appropriate for log parsing on servers, mostly because Awk will operate on files, usually structured in lines of human-readable text.
1456
1457
Design Tip: Never Use Black
One of the most important color tricks I’ve ever learned was to avoid using the color black in my work. Mrs. Zamula, my childhood art teacher, first warned me about black when I was in middle school. And I heard the same again multiple times at RISD. It sounds weird at first, but it’s good advice.
1458
Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
Google today reached the final milestone in a browser-extension transition that has been years in the making, all remaining Manifest V2 extensions were removed from the Chrome Web Store.
1459
Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times
I collect music by buying physical CDs, digitizing them with Exact Audio Copy , and scanning the artwork. This is sometimes challenging if the CD was self-published in a limited run in a foreign country ten years ago. It is very challenging if the CDs have an innate defect that renders some tracks unreadable.
1460
1461
You are not dumb, you just lack the prerequisites
I always thought I was too dumb to understand math. During my school years, it was evident to me that for some kids math was easy, and for others like myself: painfully difficult.
1462
Face it: you're a crazy person
OR: why your brain needs a boxcutter
1463
1464
CNN and USA Today have fake websites, I believe Forbes Marketplace runs them
What if I told you that Forbes Marketplace, the affiliate company operating on Forbes.com ALSO had agreements with CNN and USA Today? And that Forbes Marketplace was stuffing those sites full of affiliate content just like it is with Forbes? And what if Forbes Marketplace went to extreme efforts to hide everything?…
1465
New(ish) command line tools
A list of new(ish) command line tools
1466
A Decade of Slug
What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the…
1467
1468
1469
There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's emp...
1470