Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,215 posts.
Standard patterns in choice-based games (2015)
When I was analysing the structures of CYOA works a few years back, I began to recognise some strong recurring design patterns. I came up with some home-brewed terminology, but didn’t ever la…
Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
I wasn't entirely satisfied with the aluminum cube , so after thinking about the design for a while, I decided to make another one out of stainless steel. Just for fun, I thought I would make all the pieces using only manual machines. How hard could it be?
What I learned in 2017 writing Go
A little over a year ago, I joined Cloud Foundry to work on Loggregator , Cloud Foundry's application logging component. Its core concern is best-effort log delivery without pushing back on upstream writers. Loggregator is written entirely in Go.
Demoscene, the secret behind Finnish game industry
This is my story as a game developer. It is also a story of how the Finnish game industry came to be.
My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part One
I was recently interviewed by Fog Creek and one of the questions was about my favorite programming, coding and development books. I got very excited by this question as I'm a huge book nerd. I love books about computers, programming, and science. Every few months I spend a day or two researching the latest…
Baba Is Eval
Baba is You is a sokoban puzzle game where the rules themselves have to be manipulated to win. (For the uninitiated, the store page should explain the idea best.) The level of abstraction required to solve most levels makes it a formidable reasoning benchmark, with many reasoning steps being completely orthogonal to…
Must ride mule to and from work location
“David, this one, tell me about it …” He’d let me look at his domain name portfolio. Not names he owned and parked, but domains he owned & developed. This was another early project of his – a job board solely focused on the ranching industry. All aspects – cattle, outfitters, dude/guest, hunting, and even ... Read more
When not to use deep learning
I know it’s a weird way to start a blog with a negative, but there was a wave of discussion in the last few days that I think serves as a good hook for some topics on which I’ve been thinking recently. It all started with a post in the Simply Stats blog by Jeff Leek on the caveats of using deep learning in the small…
Angry Bird’s “overnight success” only took 8 years.
by Paul Hontz
Coolest Things I Learned in 2019
The most popular part of my Monday Musings newsletter is a section called “Coolest Things I Learned This Week.” This is a collection of the most popular ideas I shared in 2019.
The Transformer Family
Many new Transformer architecture improvements have been proposed since my last post on “The Transformer Family” about three years ago. Here I did a big refactoring and enrichment of that 2020 post — restructure the hierarchy of sections and improve many sections with more recent papers. Version 2.0 is a superset of…
Replicating GPT-2 at Home
How I (almost) replicated OpenAI’s GPT-2 (124M version)
Hash-based bisect debugging in compilers and runtimes
Does this sound familar? You make a change to a library to optimize its performance or clean up technical debt or fix a bug, only to get a bug report: some very large, incomprehensibly opaque test is now failing. Or you add a new compiler optimization with a similar result. Now you have a major debugging job in an…
FoundationDB: A distributed unbundled transactional key value store
FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store Zhou, et al., 2021
Eplot: A new package for making charts in Emacs
One of the items on my todo list was: And that’s because I’ve been looking for an easy way to do simple plots for yonks. When I did a post about movie ratings, I tried chart.el: It̵…
PostgreSQL on the Command Line
Working efficiently with psql
Lossy CSS compression for fun and loss (or profit)
Late last year, I had an idea that’s been steadily brewing in my head. I’ve found myself with some free time recently (it coincided with vacation, go figure), and I’ve hacked together some proof-of-concept code. Whether or not it is actually proving the concept I’m not sure, but the results are somewhat interesting…
Porting third-party programs to TempleOS
Experienced professional software engineer based in York, UK
A Christmas tree bauble that plays Doom
Christmas is coming again, and generally that means christmas trees and everything in it: lights, streamers, and ofcourse baubles. The holiday is all very jolly and everything, so I decided it was lacking some doom... errm, I mean Doom. So I 3d-printed a small Christmas bauble modeled on an IBM PC, stuffed it with the…
Doing an HD Remake the Right Way
This is part 1 of a series. Part 2 (regarding Final Fantasy VI) is here [https://www.fortressofdoors.com/doing-an-hd-remake-the-right-way-ffvi-edition/]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Final Fantasy V [http://store.steampowered.com/app/382890/] just came out on Steam…
Siri meets Eliza
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
Who is vfmaddrnd231pd?
vfmaddrnd231pd is a unique instruction from the FMA instruction set. Most instructions in that set have mnemonics like vfmadd231pd, but here rnd means something very specific. The Intel Software Development Manual documents it as: VFMADDRND231PD – Fused Multiply-Add of Packed Double-Precision Floating-Point Values…
An Interactive Introduction to Quantum Computing
This article was originally written in 2014, but has had some minor improvements in December 2017 and January 2018 when I received some useful feedback after the article had unexpectedly been posted on Hacker News in December 2017.
Arima Model – Guide to Time Series Forecasting in Python
Using ARIMA model, you can forecast a time series using the series past values. In this post, we build an optimal ARIMA model from scratch and extend it to Seasonal ARIMA (SARIMA) and SARIMAX models. You will also see how to build autoarima models in python