1471
Notes on Guyana
Over the summer, I visited Guyana (pronounced Guy-on-uh), mostly in and around the capital of Georgetown. I had plans to see far more of the country but they didn’t come to fruition. Sometimes whil…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
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Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023
2023 was the breakthrough year for Large Language Models (LLMs). I think it’s OK to call these AI—they’re the latest and (currently) most interesting development in the academic field of …
1473
My favorite 1980's Canadian TV show: Bits and Bytes
Reflections on whatever I'm thinking about that week (the web, culture, computer graphics, math etc)
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Demystifying GPU compute architectures
Getting 'low level' with Nvidia and AMD GPUs
1475
Taking Risk
<p>I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK’s top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College....
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TfL's simple pop-up message led to a significant drop in paper ticket sales
Transport for London (TfL) has seen a drop in the sale of paper tickets after it made a small change to the ticket machines in London Underground stations.
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The C bounded model checker: criminally underused
Follow along on a google colab: https://colab.research.google.com/github/philzook58/philzook58.github.io/blob/master/pynb/cbmc_tut.ipynb
1479
We're not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon
[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!] I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in ear…
1480
The future of Deep Learning frameworks
Assumed audience: ML researchers who frequently work with PyTorch , but are interested in trying out JAX or have yet to be convinced.
1481
Some memories of Niklaus Wirth
January 2024
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Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
An article about music and geometry, in particular about musical intervals and scales and their geometric equivalent ...
1483
Tweaking Stunt Island's 30-year-old 3D engine
Note: the patch is available at the end of the article ( HERE ). This post is about its making-of.
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The engineering behind Figma's vector networks (2019)
A deep dive into the world of vector networks, and the engineering challenges involved in their implementation.
1485
Shmøergh Hog – The making of a simple analog synth
The making of a simple analog synth
1486
The CAP theorem of Clustering: Why Every Algorithm Must Sacrifice Something
No clustering algorithm is perfect and you must make a trade-off.
1487
Startup Finance for Founders – Part I, Accounting (2016)
When we started Segment , we knew nothing about business finance. My background was in aerospace engineering, and my co-founders came from computer science and design. Beyond the hilariously overcomplicated spreadsheet we used to manage grocery bills as roommates, we really had no experience in finance when we started…
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"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens
Xe Iaso's personal website.
1489
Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux
I don’t want to post yet another anti-systemd rant, but I think the ubiquity of systemd could eventually create real problems for embedded Linux. I just wish I knew what to do about it.
1490
The sad state of property-based testing libraries
Property-based testing is a rare example of academic research that has made it to the mainstream in less than 30 years. Under the slogan “don’t write tests, generate them” property-based testing has gained support from a diverse group of programming language communities. In fact, the Wikipedia page of the original…
1491
The Apple IIGS Megahertz Myth
I love the Apple IIGS. It’s a great computer, but could it have been greater? The legend goes that Apple purposefully underclocked its CPU during development to avoid competing with the Macintosh. But is this actually true? Join me for a deep dive into the IIGS architecture, the life the 65816 CPU,
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The Undercover Generalist
Since starting out as an independent contractor, I’ve always felt a tension between being a generalist software engineer, yet having to market myself as a specialist. I’ve been wanting to write about it for years and even have kept some notes for that purpose. Recently I came across an article by Ben Collins-Sussman…
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I spent a year building an Android course for the elderly
This is my story about an adventure into online teaching, video course making, and choosing a hard-to-reach audience, who desperately needs help.
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The Berkeley Software Distribution
UNIX is always litigious
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A Mini Monitor for a Pi
This post outlines how I used a small 2 inch display as a monitor for my pi. Where it can display tty terminals and X desktops and applications as if it was a normal screen connected over hdmi. My overall goal is to have a sort of handheld “console” that I can connect a keyboard to and use as a normal computer. This…
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Déjà vu: Ghostly CVEs in my terminal title
As I've spoken and written about all modern terminals are actually "emulating" something dating from the 1970s.
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Indexing iCloud Photos with AI Using LLaVA and Pgvector
A straightforward idea, gluing stuff together until it works, but it’s a glimpse of what’s possible with help of local AIs in near future
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How to Use the Foreign Function API in Java 22 to Call C Libraries
Using Java's Foreign Function API to Call C like fopen, fgets, and fclose.