20161
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,239 posts.
20162
The First Lisp Compiler
This page examines the earliest surviving Lisp compiler, written by Timothy Hart and Michael Levin around 1961. To avoid repetition of phrases like “the compiler”, we will use the abbreviation “ HLC ” (for “Hart–Levin Compiler”) to refer to it. The HLC was introduced in M.I.T. AIM -039 and documented more fully in the…
20163
20164
Counting Things in Python: A History
Sometimes the Pythonic way to solve a problem changes over time. As Python has evolved, so has the Pythonic way to count list items. Let’s look at...
20165
20166
20167
20168
Build a Business, Not an Audience
If you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure you’ve seen the following pattern over and over again:
20169
Lightfastness Testing of Colored Pencils
Discover the best and worst coloured pencils and markers for lightfastness, ensuring your artwork stays vibrant and doesn't fade too quickly.
20170
20171
20172
Using Fourier Transforms to Multiply Numbers
The purpose of this article is to show you step-by-step examples of how to use the Fourier transform algorithm to multiply two numbers. The primary advantage of using fourier transforms to multiply numbers is that you can use the asymptotically much faster 'Fast Fourier Transform algorithm', to achieve better…
20173
Best algorithms book I ever read
Best algorithms book I ever read I took a fair amount of time looking at data structures and algorithms while I was st...
20174
Bloom filters are good for search that does not scale
Jonathan Arns's personal blog
20175
Perfect example of real-life hacking
In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself. Recognizing a good…
20176
Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited
Back in 2017 I wrote an article in which I attempted to explain how YouTube works under the hood, how it serves streams to the client, and also how you can exploit that knowledge to download videos from the site. The primary goal of that write-up was to…
20177
Programming Books You Wish You Read Earlier
There are so many programming books out there, sometimes it's hard to know what books are best. You won't find cracking the coding interview, the pragmatic programmer, or even the best python book. These are the best programming books curated from each major Software field.
20178
Neural network from scratch
In this edition of Napkin Math, we’ll invoke the spirit of the Napkin Math series to establish a mental model for how a neural network works by building one from scratch. In a future issue we will do napkin math on performance, as establishing the first-principle understanding is plenty of ground to cover for today!
20179
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
20180
Simple questions to help reduce AI hype
AI is a young field full of amazing potential. This mystery and lack of understanding allows for hype to grow unchecked.
20181
20182
Datasette.io, an official project website for Datasette
This week I launched datasette.io—the new official project website for Datasette. Datasette’s first open source release was just over three years ago, but until now the official site duties have …
20183
Let’s implement a Bloom Filter
I am planning to create a series of blog posts that includes some literature research, implementation of various data structures and our journey of creating a distributed datastore in distrentic.io.
20184
A Visual Exploration of Gaussian Processes
Consulting software engineer and research scientist. I build visualization systems for complex data and machine learning models.
20185
How to sleep a million years (2013)
Let me assure you, the "fluxcapacitor" project is very interesting. Unfortunately, I find it very difficult to describe what it does. For this project I completely fail the elevator pitch .
20186
Implementing Wordle in the Firefox address bar
A version of Wordle that runs inside the Firefox address bar via abuse of the Opensearch spec.
20187
Solving Wordle with uv's dependency resolver
mildbyte.xyz
20188
Advanced web security topics
(Updated 22 May 2020) This post discusses web security issues that I come across – so far thankfully mostly by reading about them. It is a work in progress which I’ll keep updating. The…
20189
20190
Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II
As I noted in Part I, the general idea of using heat and steam for mechanical work had a long and continuous history back to ancient times. But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive, or pushing force. We actually mean a…