Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,242 posts.
I've now been recording music at home for most of my life. I started at around 14. I would record things into audacity, sometimes with my friend Cameron, but more often by myself. I had no real idea of how to write, arrange, or record music. Besides a few covers I would mostly record incredibly abstruse 'experimental…
Greg Lehey's online diary
In 1969, Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert published Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry. In it, they showed that a single-layer perceptron cannot compute the XOR function. The main argument relies on linear separability: Perceptrons are linear classifiers, which essentially means drawing a line to…
Finite-state machine (FSM) is a wonderful model of computation that has many practical applications. One of my favorites is turning business logic into simple FSMs. For example consider the following requirements for an order management system:
So, you want to improve the performance of your deep learning model. How might you approach such a task? Often, folk fall back to a grab-bag of tricks that might've worked before or saw on a tweet. "Use in-place operations! Set gradients to None! Install PyTorch 1.10.0 but not 1.10.1!"
There is no clear, widely-accepted definition of Functional Programming. It is a collection of related featues which cohere well into a very useful style of programming.
China is a kleptocracy of a scale never seen before in human history. This post aims to explain how this wave of theft is financed, what ...
Over the last 18 months, I've taken the time to create 108 short YouTube videos that summarize all of the commands that are found in the Coreutils Package . These videos focus mostly on Coreutils v8.3, but also included are a few commands from v9.0 as well. For each of the blog posts, I've adapted and modified the…
Modern design tools, of both the vector and code kind, are amazing pieces of software that in recent years have transformed the design profession, but none of them seem to really understand the context that we currently design for. The remnants of fixed-dimensions are still visible in all and the tools are not helping…
As much as I love digital instruments, synthesizers and other electronic gear I also really love the look and feel of instruments made from wood, brass, steel and felt. There is objectively no difference between the best digitally sampled pianos but for some reason it doesn’t quite feel as much alive as an actual…
According to the Apple support document How to identify the DFU port on Mac , the DFU (device firmware update) port location for MacBook Pro models with Apple silicon is as follows:
This text presents a method for embedding a programmable, general-purpose, digital computer into Tetris. It describes the capabilities and performance of an implementation that runs Tetris on Tetris.
The MirkoPC is so far the closest thing to a full-fledged Raspberry Pi desktop computer: Based on the Compute Module 4, it has a full-size M.2 M-key slot, allowing the Pi to boot from reliable and fast NVMe SSD storage, a built-in headphone amp and line out, 4 USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, two HDMI ports, and a…
There are a lot of scams out there, but one that's been plaguing bloggers like me lately is a novel twist: A fake DMCA takedown notice that's actually a link insertion scam! Beware: The notices I'm getting are very convincing-looking, complete with a fake law firm website!
A closer look at the glyphs drawn by the DEC terminals VT100 and VT220.
Software Engineer at Figma. Previously at Dropbox. Studied Math/CS at Brown University.
In a stuffed apartment filled with hydrofluoric acid, oscilloscopes and a transistor curve tracer, Jeri Ellsworth carefully places a hand-cut silicon wafer into a 1000 degree furnace. The ambient noise of police sirens can be heard in the background: "Ugh, the police are coming... So the instructions for the…
How consultancies can get recurring revenue, deepen client relationships, and improve project outcomes by using some tactics from software companies.
The source code for the classic PSX launch title wipEout was leaked in 2022. A few month ago I finally sat down to take a look at it. The result is a (nearly) complete rewrite that compiles to Windows, Linux, macOS and WASM.
Understanding the Tensor Processing Unit
Ai competitions are fun, community building, talent scouting, brand promoting, and attention grabbing. But competitions are not intended to develop useful models.
Recently I've been plagued with Tweets saying that I'm "trending in London." As flattering as that is, it's not true. There appears to be a network of Twitter bots which are randomly repeating other people's tweets, ripping off avatars and bios, and generally causing a nuisance. Looking at the users' Twitter name, I…
Just say NO to Paxos overhead: replacing consensus with network ordering Li et al., OSDI 2016 Everyone knows that consensus systems such as Paxos, Viewstamped Replication, and Raft impose high over…
I’ve got a big news to share with you today - after (over) 9 years of development, Emacs Prelude finally made it to version 1.0! There’s nothing really big or groundbreaking there, as Prelude has been in a pretty good place for a very long time feature-wise, but I felt like tagging a 1.0 release, because it’s 2020 and…
For some reason, nobody's written about what it takes to crawl a big chunk of the web in a while: the last point of reference I saw was Michael Nielsen's post from 2012 .
