2161
Can solar and wind power Britain? An update of David MacKay's numbers
These technologies have developed a lot since 2008. Should we be any more optimistic about their potential to power Britain?
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,824 posts.
2162
Globalization is dead and no one is listening
This is the end of the beginning.
2163
The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
The story of the infamous disappearance of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic, and the fundamentally human mistakes which led to the tragedy.
2164
I measured the pollution from my gas stove
Here's what I learned putting air quality monitors all over my house.
2165
I don't want to host services but I do
I don't want to self-host and think most individuals shouldn't host services for others. Yet I do it anyway, and even teach people how to.
2166
Bun, JavaScript, and TCO
Bun is a JavaScript runtime that just released version 1.0! Now you have three choices for running JavaScript outside of the browser: Node, Deno, and Bun. One of Bun's selling points is speed! It makes some interesting decisions to achieve this.
2167
I cancelled my Replit subscription
I cancelled my annual Replit Hacker plan and I'll let it lapse at the end of December of 2023. Replit is a popular and growing multi lan...
2168
Unix shells are generally not viable access control mechanisms any more
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
2169
Resetting the timer in my toothbrush
It’s still good to use, I swear
2170
2171
LLMs Unleashed: The Power of Fine-Tuning
Disclaimer: This article mentions https://terra-cotta.ai/, an LLM experimentation platform I am building Introduction ChatGPT, Bard, and other large language models (LLMs) are very useful for a wide variety of tasks from writing code to answering complex questions to aiding with education. However, these models are…
2172
A baffling scale transform on a chart of university course selection trends
Harvard Magazine printed the following chart that confirms a trend in undergraduate majors that we all know about: students are favoring STEM majors at the expense of humanities.
2173
Back-end parallelism in the Rust compiler
This post describes some performance work I have been doing recently on rustc. I spent several weeks on a particular problem with only a small amount of success. I hope a write-up will be interesting and educational, and may even lead to suggestions that make things better. The post is aimed at readers with some…
2174
"A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4
A short simulation of Neal Stephenson's Illustrated Primer using GPT-4 and DALL·E 3.
2175
2176
Passive Solar Water Desalination
I know we are supposed to be worried about the world supply of fresh water. I have been hearing that at least for the last 40 years, and the statistics are alarming. According to the Global Commission on the Economics of Water: "We are seeing the consequences not of freak events, nor of population growth
2177
Hexadecimal clock counting down to 2038 problem
It is now ??????????.??? ( ????-??-??T??:??:??.???Z ) in Unix time , according to your local system clock.
2178
Rust on Espressif chips – 2023 Roadmap
Scott Mabin's blog
2179
Pictures of a working garbage collector
C++, a "Reality sandwich", and an Octopus.
2180
Going Rogue
When a beleaguered Netscape announced in January of 1998 that it would release the source code to its browser for everyone to tinker with and improve upon, the news shook the worlds of technology and business to their foundations. This open-source “revolution,” as even many in the mainstream press took to calling it…
2181
Working on Multiple Web Projects with Docker Compose and Traefik
Docker Compose is a brilliant tool for bringing up local development environments for web projects. But working with multiple projects can be a pain due to clashes. For example, all projects want to listen to port 80 (or perhaps one of the super common higher ones like 8000 etc.). This forces developers to only bring…
2182
Reverse Engineering the DualShock 4
This year I got a very special gift for Christmas: a broken DualShock 4. :smile:You may say it’s a relatively poor gift, but the person who gave me this know...
2183
64bit computing on a budget
With all that Dec Alpha talk , and how hard it is to get hardware, and how seemingly exclusionary it is, I thought I would try to touch on a more available 64bit ‘risc’ platform, for the masses!
2184
How I came to write “Tidy First?” tl;dr it took 18 years
Taking a software design course in college (Go Ducks!), we used Ed Yourdon (RIP) & Larry Constantine’s book Structured Design as a text.
2185
Putting Down the Pen: Reflecting on Oryx’s Journey
By Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans Dear everyone, I had always imagined 'penning' this farewell someday. You see, the journey of...
2186
Ultra Deep look at Messier 81 and 82
An ultra deep 393h look at the galaxy pair M81/M82 - Amateurs reveal full Ha stream for the first time
2187
Reddit is undeleting years worth of comments and posts
Attached: 1 image Well fuck #reddit - they have just undeleted posts I made years ago that I'd removed when I did a purge a couple of years back. So Reddit didn't actually delete the data - also these videos are no longer on YT so the thumb is cached They are so fucked #gdpr…
2188
AI isn’t good enough
On a recent cross-country trip—I (Paul) drove from California to Illinois and back again.
2189
Why did Usenet fail?
This is annecdata - not a serious academic study. Adjust your expectations accordingly. When I first got online, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy - so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet. I loved their well organised chat room. A couple of clicks and I could be discussing Babylon 5 with people in…
2190
Nvidia’s AI supremacy is only temporary
Nvidia is an amazing company that has executed a contrarian vision for decades, and has rightly become one of the most valuable corporations on the planet thanks to its central role in the AI revol…