Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,710 posts.
I’m sure that some pictures are worth a thousand words, but others trigger a whole lot of puzzlement. Such was the case with the cover of a book I recently bought entitled Calculating with Tones: The Logarithmic Logic of Music:
Last week’s adventures with the Exidy Sorcerer led me to write a Z80 version of the LZ4 decompressor I’d previously used on the SNES, the CoCo, and the Genesis. At this point, this has …
Tony Hoare at the LASER summer school, September 2007 (All photographs in this article are by the author) Had they included just one of Tony Hoare’s major achievements, many scientific careers would be considered prestigious enough. His had a long list, which I am going to try to summarize, not pretending to get…
In 1980, Intel released the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster. As well as arithmetic...
I was recently encouraged to watch A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design (DoD) by Andrew Kelley, the creator of Zig1. Just 10 minutes into the talk, I was confronted with a skill I had never formally learned… the arithmetic behind memory layout of types. Zig is a modern, C-like programming language which…
Raft is a consensus protocol for managing a replicated log across a cluster of nodes. Its key goals are: (1) maintain a consistent replicated log of state transitions, (2) tolerate node failures, and (3) ensure a single leader coordinates all changes while multiple followers replicate. Raft is designed to be…
One of the most surprising aspects of the Nix language is that it is lazy, especially if you have never used a lazy language before. This laziness is what makes much of Nixpkgs possible, and its complexity.
Ethical Hacking and Cybersecurity Blog
In mid-December last year I started making my own programming language. It's waaay far from any production quality yet (though I did manage to write a working 1k LOC Monte-Carlo path tracer in it), but the project is on pause right now, so I figured it's a good time to write something about it.
If you often get static electricity shocks when touching your laptop or your office chair, or your monitor goes black when you stand up, this may interest you.
A. Karpathy once said that OpenAI researchers are effectively "automating themselves away" by improving their AI. Right now I develop Beagle SCM with Anthropic's Fable and it is of course a brilliant model able to spot nits in a mountain of code, file tickets, make fixes. Still, yesterday it managed to commit the…
I was happy with the Remarkable 2 and when the Remarkable Pro came out I decided to go with a second one in order to be able to see two pages at once : one as a reference for reading and one for writing, as one would normally do with paper. Expensive approach, I know.
Yesterday, I timeboxed 45 minutes to write down every single rule of good social skills I could come up with, wrote a tweet thread, then it went somewhat viral !
I have too many git branches and like many people I developed a convoluted script to show me the most recent ones. I ran this command many times a day for years:
We trained an MLP that predicts 58 body shape parameters from 8 questionnaire inputs. The trick: a differentiable physics loss. Mass accuracy: 0.3 kg mean vs 3.9 kg for Ridge. No GPU at inference.
Friends, this post has been in the making for maybe, 20 years.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The Port of Long Beach in Southern California is the second-busiest container seaport in the United States, a major gateway for goods flowing to and from the west coast. Together with its next door neighbor, the Port of Los Ange
I generally avoid messing with Li-ion battery packs, but these are both Ni-mh and expensive.
Improving the Xbox 360 Bad Update exploit to trigger nearly instantaneously with near 100% success rate.
The CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic have both claimed that human-level AI is just around the corner — and at times, that it's already here. These claims have generated enormous public attention. There has been some technical scrutiny of these claims, but critiques rarely reach the public discourse. This piece is a sketch…
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
It can be hard running a small business. If you want to sell to a large organisation like the UK Government, there are forms to fill in, checks to comply with, tenders to bid on, and a hundred other things. Luckily, there's the RM6237 Low Value Purchase System to make everything better. If a department wants to buy…
Personal Notes
In 2004 I played too much RuneScape on a 56k modem that died the moment Mum picked up the phone. A 3D world, up to a couple of thousand players on a server, dozens on screen at once - in the browser, on 5 kilobytes per second. It worked. Let’s follow a single step and see how.
You can still discover stuff, I promise
Linux 7.0 delivered roughly half the throughput of Linux 6.x on the same hardware and workload.
This wonderful article by Marius Bakke (thanks for using Haunt btw!) about guix shell hit the orange website front page recently. I left a comment to the effect of “hell yeah I use it for all my projects!” and someone asked me for an example of what I do. I sent them some links but I thought hey, this could be a blog…
Almost everything alive on the surface of this planet runs, ultimately, on sunlight. Plants capture light and turn it into sugar. Animals eat the plants.
tiling window managers are wonderful. ultra-flexible text editors are also wonderful. for a spell, i thought i'd found the ideal solution in exwm … and i think it would have been, save for the fact that i use ordinary, graphical windows as much, if not more than, text buffers, and sometimes those windows are from…
