Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,217 posts.
Last summer, Adobe killed their image exchange format "FXG". The idea was to have a publicly defined XML based image format which could handle vectors, bitmaps, and layers, and could be read and written by any app that wanted to support it (as Acorn did for a while).
It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.” That short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would
As a fun afternoon challenge, I decided to write a C program that looked nothing like C. Not necessarily obfuscated, though there is a competition for that if you are so inclined.
Who can punch themselves in the face with reality the most? This is who will win in the age of AI.
Discover why Docker is transitioning to Alpine Linux. Learn about the benefits of smaller, faster, and more secure containers and why you should switch your Docker images to Alpine.
I stopped working at Google in 2006 but I only stopped loving it this month. I’ve frequently defended the company in public, explaining unpopular actions from what I imagine their side is. Google has often been in the right but the company is terrible at explaining itself. I felt with my understanding of the company I…
A useful pattern for LLM classification at scale is to let it hallucinate plausible, fake entities. Then resolve to real ones.
Almost all mathematical questions one could have about Wordle are settled by now. I summarize here what is known so far.
Why we can’t go home again
In the classic 1986 essay, No Silver Bullet , Fred Brooks argued that there is, in some sense, not that much that can be done to improve programmer productivity. His line of reasoning is that programming tasks contain a core of essential/conceptual 1 complexity that's fundamentally not amenable to attack by any…
Cut out everything that's not surprising.
See the end of the post for an October 2018 bug fix update, or read the whole story: Flaky failures are the worst. In this particular investigation, which spanned twenty months, we suspected hardwa…
Did you use to have some sort of intuition for what “lvalue” and “rvalue” meant? Are you confused about glvalues, xvalues and prvalues, and worry that lvalues and rvalues mi…
Shipping large software to end-user devices is a complicated process. Shipping large software securely to end-user devices is even more complicated. Signing the things that ship to end-user devices is
Collected tips from building the Austral compiler.
Tensorflow 2.0 will be a major milestone for the most popular machine learning framework: lots of changes are coming, and all with the aim of making ML accessible to everyone. These changes, however, require for the old users to completely re-learn how to use the framework: this article describes all the (known)…
Temperature is a parameter used in natural language processing models to increase or decrease the “confidence” a model has in its most likely response.
This is not a competition, is just to show how to use the hardware with relative efficiency, being the idea is to show something collaborative rather than competitive.
A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start or they get stuck. That’s in part because our perception of what websites should be has changed so dramatically over the last 20 years.
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
The three companies (along with Mozilla, which is on one of their “ad features in the browser” kicks again) are drawing up a built-in advertising measurement system, called Attribution Level 1 , as a standard feature of web browsers. The system is intended to measure the effectiveness of advertising by enabling…
There have been so many articles posted on Steve Jobs in the past week, I really thought I wasn’t going to add one here on my blog. However, yesterday, John Lilly wrote a great piece on Steve…
