Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,217 posts.
Malcolm Gladwell writes about a fascinating episode in history. Neville Chamberlain’s first plane ride was a trip to meet Adolf Hitler. The British Prime Minister was taken by Hitler’s charisma. He believed the German leader when he promised not to invade Czechoslovakia. After his triumphant return from Germany…
I hate having to use that word - "alleged" - because it's so inconclusive and I know it will leave people with many unanswered questions. (Edit: 12 days after publishing this blog post, it looks like the "alleged" caveat can be dropped, see the addition at the end of the post
Caveat: This post is meant address people who are completely new to deep learning and are planning an entry into this field. The intention is to help them think critically about the complexity of the field, and to help them tell apart things that are trivial from things that are...
Complexity has to live somewhere; but it does not have to live everywhere.
Sounds great! But what does it mean? seL4 seL4 (pronounced ess-e-ell-four) is arguably the world’s most secure operating system (OS) kernel. The OS kernel is the lowest level of software runn…
A few years ago, Sean ‘xobs’ Cross and I built an open-source laptop, Novena, from the circuit boards up, and shared our designs with the world. I’m a strong proponent of open hardware, because sharing knowledge is sharing power. One thing we didn’t anticipate was how much the press wanted to frame our open hardware…
Inefficient does not mean ineffective, and it is certainly not the same as lazy. You get things done – just not in the most effective way possible. You’re a bit sloppy, and use more energy. But don’t feel bad about it. There is real value in not being the best.
Today Rebecca Burger Becky Heineman shares the tale of porting Doom to the 3DO console under extreme conditions. There is an engine to tweak, deadlines to hit, hardware acceleration to get working, and dramatic rock anthems to record. We also learn about how game piracy led her to game development and what it was like…
This is my journey of creating a proof-of-concept of persisting an SQLite database in a Cloudflare Durable Object. It is not meant as a tutorial, but rather as something I myself can get back to it, to revisit what and why I did certain things.
An employee at Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI leaked a private key on GitHub that for the past two months could have allowed anyone to query private xAI large language models (LLMs) which appear to have been custom made for working with internal data from Musk’s companies, including SpaceX , Tesla and…
I mentioned recently, buried in a post about UI changes, that Twitter’s latest earnings report included this bombshell: We are going to fix the broken windows and confusing parts, like the .@name syntax and @reply rules, that we know inhibit usag
Bipartisan Alliance, a Society for the Study of the US Constitution, and of Human Nature, where Republicans and Democrats meet.
The following article summarizes my lessons learned from the books Deep Work and Flow. It can be the way to achieve a fulfilled life. Cal Newport and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi have written outstanding books in their ...
What do revolutionary new Sudoku techniques teach us about real-world problem solving?
I’m trying to get into neural networks. There have been a couple big breakthroughs in the field in recent years and suddenly my side project of messing around with programming languages seeme…
SQLite has evolved far beyond a simple embedded database. Explore modern features like JSON, FTS5, window functions, strict tables, and more.
pho·ny also pho·ney (fō'nē) adj. pho·ni·er, pho·ni·est 1. a. Not genuine or ...
The Metal Gear series achieved world-wide recognition when Metal Gear Solid became a best-seller on the original PlayStation almost two …
Furiosa’s Cat Feeder
The beginning of serious work on the operating system that would come to be known as OS/2 left Microsoft’s team of Windows developers on decidedly uncertain ground. As OS/2 ramped up, Windows ramped down in proportion, until by the middle of 1986 Tandy Trower had just a few programmers remaining on his team. What had…
How far can I get in Advent of Code if I do all the problems in Dreams?
Copyright 1999 by Craig A. Finseth. Contact the author with questions about distribution rights.
Pixels of LCD monitors are usually composed of three stripes of the colors red, green, and blue. Tech enthusiast Matt Sarnoff used this property to his advantage when inventing [a subpixel text encoding font](http://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/). Its glyphs are comprised of colored strips only one pixel wide. But when…
Writing about the first winter the men spent on the ice, Cherry-Garrard casually mentions an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expedition’s doctors:
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.
The Spring Lisp Game Jam 2024 ended one week ago. 48 games were submitted, a new record for the jam! This past week has been a time for participants to play and rate each other’s games. As I explored the entries, I noticed two distinct meta-patterns in how people approached building games with Lisp. I think these…
