Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
This post contains two unrelated announcements. Firstly, I would like to promote a useful list of resources for AI in Mathematics, that was initiated by Talia Ringer (with the crowdsourced assistan…
A family of infinite sums that evaluate to rational numbers, sometimes integers, and and effective algorithm for finding the sum.
Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand the nature of government reform
In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research” . Here are his opinions from 1999 on "what worked".
Cutting out the news has been one of the best lifestyle decisions I've made in recent years, second only to cutting out social media (though the two are not mutually exclusive). Reducing my intake of what is essentially junk information has significantly reduced anxiety and worry in my day to day life, and has freed…
For the past few days, I have been toying with an idea for a board game. To test it out, I wanted to write a simple implementation of it. Here’s an example of a type we might need in a critical phase of the game.
I’m sure we are all familiar with the idea of a technological singularity. Humans create an AI that is smart enough to create an even smarter successor. That successor then creates an even sm…
On volcanoes, crises, and what we can learn from Icelanders
The Netscapes of AI
A substantial philosophical literature explores the " unity of consciousness ": If I experience A, B, and C at the same time, A, B, and C will normally in some sense (exactly what sense is disputed) be experientially conjoined. Sipping beer at a concert isn't a matter of experiencing the taste of beer and separately…
I am an advocate of regenerative farming . But I’m not a farmer myself. The piece of land I steward is 1/3 acre — still sizable for an urban lot, but laughably minuscule compared to what Real Farmers are working with.
Just intonation (JI) today falls under the umbrella of microtonal music, because it involves playing "between the notes" of the 12-tone scale we're used to. As I type microtonal , my spellchecker decorates it with a sad squiggle, confirming I've drifted (again) into a topic that's not even in its dictionary. But JI is…
Revisiting the timeless von Neumann Architecture
Names and emails (even Sumit’s) have been redacted to protect the innocent and the guilty. But you know who you are. Who is Sumit B? I...
Hacking on PostgreSQL is really hard. I think a lot of people would agree with this statement, not all for the same reasons. Some might poin...
A little rest area by the road to a better web.
Multiprocessor Synchronization was one of my favorite classes during my undergrad — it had a clear progression from theory to practice, starting at the theory of consensus numbers and moving onto atomic operations and then synchronization primitives and lock-free data structures, all from first principles. With…
Fixing problems that shouldn't exist
The fact that we can’t remove essential complexity with a software redesign doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do about it. What if the problem definition wasn’t outside of our purview? What if we could get the world to conform to the software, and not just the other way around?
Ever wondered how the ^.?$|^(..+?)\1+$ regular expression can tell you if a number is not prime? In this blog post you'll learn how and why it works. Code examples in Java, JavaScript, Python and Perl are provided.
Bouyed by the surprisingly good performance of neural networks with quantization aware training on the CH32V003, I wondered how far this can be pushed. How much can we compress a neural network whi…
A simple XSS in Google application
Wild ramblings, raport from the field about choosing Vector Database for a particular project and a little bit of a rant about the current state of AI and how it's perceived, why human brains are a wonder of nature, and why it's far from 'thinking' and 'consciousness'.
One of the quickest ways to determine whether particular application runs using Xwayland is to resize one of its windows and see how it behaves, for example
