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Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
The key question about AI and school is about the past
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,821 posts.
2582
Bye, Twitter
Today I’m leaving Twitter, because I don’t like making unpaid contributions to a for-profit publisher whose proprietor is an alt-right troll. But also because it’s probably going to break down. Read on for details.
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“Privacy”.com–Yeah Right
At the behest of a friend of mine, I decided to get myself a Privacy.com account. I filled it out with my personal information, activated the account, and...
2584
What caused the hallucinations of the Oracle of Delphi?
Why did the oracle of Delphi go into a trance state? Does it have anything to do with ethylene?
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The high price we pay for social media
Sitting exams is unpleasant at the best of times, but my daughter believes she has extra cause to complain. Two of her A-level papers are scheduled for the same time, so she must take a break betwe…
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Justice Clarence Thomas uncovered a seven-year-old bug in my program (2013)
Franklin Chen's personal website and blog
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Go's Concurrency Examples in Java 19
There is no way for your operating system to know exactly how much stack space a thread will need so it allocates an amount on the order of around a kilobyte initially and then around a megabyte once the thread starts to be used. You only have around a bakers dozen gigabytes of RAM, so you can only have give or take…
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Optimizing compilers reload vector constants needlessly
Modern processors have powerful vector instructions which allow you to load several values at once, and operate (in one instruction) on all these values. Similarly, they allow you to have vector constants. Thus if you wanted to add some integer (say 10001) to all integers in a large array, you might first load a…
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Futurist prediction methods and accuracy
I've been reading a lot of predictions from people who are looking to understand what problems humanity will face 10-50 years out (and sometimes longer) in order to work in areas that will be instrumental for the future and wondering how accurate these predictions of the future are. The timeframe of predictions that…
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Reflections on my time in Y Combinator
A quick intro: This is the first post I’ve written in quite a while, but it’s also the first time I feel like I’ve had a chance to breathe this year. I’m on a “vacation”, although it stops feeling like that when you have a toddler
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“Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)
This is one of my favorite stories from all of my years in applying TOC. I use it frequently in my consulting work and again it's totally tr...
2593
SwiftUI for Mac 2022
Crazy Mac lady. Mac author & developer. Lover of Apple computers and devices. Swift & SwiftUI enthusiast. Unofficial Mac app dev evangelist
2594
Trump's Trading Card Grift Is Worse Than You Think
Shell companies, rubbing elbows with international criminals, and worse in his scam of scams
2595
Write Like You Code
Similarities between good writing and good code.
2596
Welcome to Hotel Elsevier: you can check-out any time you like – not
In December 2021, Robin Kok wrote a series of tweets about his Elsevier data access request. I did the same a few days later. This here is the resulting collaborative blog post...
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Confirmed the MOS 7600/7601 Pong chip is a true microcontroller
In a previous article I discussed the MOS 7600 and 7601 "Pong in a chip" ICs, manufactured by MOS Technology (of the famous 6502) and act...
2598
Micro-SaaS Alternatives to BigTech/VC
A list of small internet startups built by solo developers or tiny teams which can be used as alternatives to big tech/VC-funded startups. Choosing these alternatives helps their founders make money to live their lives and focus on working on their products.
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Explained from scratch: private information retrieval and homomorphic encryption
This is a from-scratch explanation of private information retrieval built using homomorphic encryption. I try to assume only a general math / computer science background. To simplify things, my explanations may not always match academic definitions. You can check out this paper or code for more.
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Browser in the Dark: flashlights with CSS and canvas
Note: this article will make more sense if you are using a mouse or other pointing device. Requires javascript.
2601
Color.js Released
It has taken Lea and I far too long – there is always something more that really should be added, always some conversion that really needs an authoritive set of data to validate our code against – but we finally decided, time to actually release Color.js .
2602
Resumes are dangerous?
I've been interviewing engineers for a while now, and it seems the more interviews I do, the more I realize how many my initial assumptions about hiring were wrong. For example, take resumes. Initially, before every interview I'd carefully review resumes. I'd look at candidate's past
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The James Webb Space Telescope – making 300 points of failure reliable
The JWST must perform a bewildering array of tasks — unfurling panels, mirrors and more — how can engineers trust telescope’s reliability?
2606
Helium
A major reason that cryptocurrencies have become such a problem is that mainstream journalists normally just regurgitate the hype they are f...
2607
Five Levels of Hype
Trying to categorize exuberance
2608
PAGNIs: Probably Are Gonna Need Its (2021)
Luke Page has a great post up with his list of YAGNI exceptions. YAGNI—You Ain’t Gonna Need It—is a rule that says you shouldn’t add a feature just because it …
2609
How to Learn Nix
Five years ago, I migrated my VPS from Arch Linux to NixOS. I had no idea what I was doing. I had never used Nix before. I thought I could figure it out. Five years later, I’m still running NixOS. And I still have no idea how it works.
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