18991
Markov Chains for programmers
Materials for book: “Markov Chains for programmers”
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,224 posts.
18992
Eller’s Algorithm (2012)
Eller's algorithm creates 'perfect' mazes, having only a single path between any two cells, one row at a time. The algorithm itself is incredibly fast, and far more memory efficient than other popular algorithms (such as Prim's and Kruskal's) requiring storage proportional to only a single row. This makes it possible…
18993
Like Game-of-Life, but on Growing Graphs, with WASM and WebGL
Experimental simulation of emergent complexity through graph-rewriting automata.
18994
Lost Chapter of Automate the Boring Stuff: Audio, Video, and Webcams in Python
The third edition of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is now available for purchase or to read for free online . It has updated content and several new chapters, but one chapter that was left on the cutting room floor was "Working with Audio, Video, and Webcams" . I present the 26-page rough draft chapter in this…
18995
Building a Distributed Log from Scratch: Data Replication
In part one of this series we introduced the idea of a message log, touched on why it’s useful, and discussed the storage mechanics behind it. In part two, we discuss data replication. We have our log. We know how to write data to it and read it back as well as how data is persisted. The caveat to this is, although we…
18996
Making an AI bid writer refuse to lie
A year of failure postmortems from building document AI for public tenders: phantom partners, silent coverage collapses, broken truth-meters, and why the refusal became the product.
18997
18998
Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
Readers with long memories may recall the brief, inglorious UK fuel shortage of a few weeks ago, which was mostly caused by the rush to refuel for fear the pumps would run dry. Some petrol stations…
18999
19000
72% of the dollar's purchasing power was destroyed in just four episodes
The US dollar lost 96.9% of its value since 1914. Four inflationary episodes spanning 29% of the time caused 72% of the destruction. Monthly dataset, 1,357 obs.
19001
Do Not Disclose Your Salary to Recruiters
Recruiters are not my most favorite people in the tech eco-system. They’re the people that will contact you on behalf of some client (the company that pays them) in order to try to find new employees. They typically get paid a fairly hefty sum per employee found and if ever there was a moment when the ‘you are the…
19002
DRY Is a Trade-Off
DRY, or Don't Repeat Yourself is frequently touted as a principle of software development. "Copy-pasta" is the derisive term applied to a violation of it, tying together the concept of copying code and pasta as description of software development bad practices (see also spaghetti code ).
19003
The Sucker Complex
One is killed every minute
19004
Ethereum Services Are Centralized
EDIT: I would have fleshed this out more had I known it would be so widely circulated, but to address some common criticisms:
19005
The Pirate Bay Is The World’s Most Efficient Public Library
The way media piracy works is that one person or group purchases a work, and then shares it with millions of other people. This...
19006
19007
Robertson vs. Torx screw drives (2021)
I’m going to get straight to the point and say that it’s time for Robertson screws to be retired and supplanted by Torx. This posting is to explain why and is partly motivated by lots o…
19008
Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020216 points205 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Hey folks! Fireside this week, but next week, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the blog (the first post went up May 3rd) we’re diving into a look at Helm’s Deep in both the book…
19009
19010
Microsoft is eating the world
If OpenAI was a public company, it's stock would have been down about 38% today in a shocking turn of events.
19011
19012
Cruel optimism and lazy pessimism
Do you remember the avocado toast guy? I read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus recently (you should read it, it’s great), and I learned that someone1 has come up with a name for this sort of modern reinterpretation of “let them eat cake”: cruel optimism. Cruel optimism, the way Hari interprets it2, boils down to the folly…
19013
LLMs Are Not Fun
I got into programming because it let me turn thought into reality. If I could reason precisely, then a computer could carry out my thoughts unerringly. I could step away from tiring, ambiguous human interaction for a while.
19014
Open Source .NET three years later
A little over 3 years ago Microsoft announced that they were open sourcing large parts of the .NET framework and as Scott Hanselman said in his Connect 2016 keynote, the community has been contributing in a significant way:
19015
Why I stopped using StartSSL (Hint: it involves a Chinese company)
StartSSL uses https://auth.startssl.com/ for the front-end to access to their PKIs (login to the PKI, create, revoke certificates...). It's the Core of their service and the critical part of their infrastructure.
19016
19017
C23: A Slightly Better C
One of the established and most popular programming languages is the C programming language. It is relatively easy to learn, and highly practical. Maybe surprisingly, the C programming language keeps evolving, slowly and carefully. If you have GCC 13 or LLVM (Clang) 16, you already have a compiler with some of the…
19018
Running one’s own root Certificate Authority in 2023
A tale how running your own x509 root CA – for internal services – changed in the last 20 years.
19019
19020
Stop saying "just" (2019)
Do you work in Software Engineering, and have you seen messages or sentences like these before?