Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
When I started learning about loss functions, I could always understand the intuition behind them. For example, the mean squared error (MSE) for regression seemed logical—penalizing large deviations from the ground-truth makes sense. But one thing always bothered me: I could never come up with those loss functions on…
A real explanation of discrete Fourier transform (DFT, FFT), discrete cosine transform (DCT), and their inverses.
Interactive Mathematical Applets and Animations
A hands-on introduction to database internals. Build an LSM storage engine with SSTables, compaction, WAL recovery, MVCC, and transactions.
The central fact about child rearing by my parents was the equal intellectual status of everyone in the family.
Recently, the Linux Mint Blog published Monthly News – April 2024, which goes into detail about wanting to fork and maintain older GNOME apps in collaboration with other GTK-based desktop environments. Despite the good intentions of the author, Clem, many readers interpreted this as an attack against GNOME…
Discussing the importance of working alongside your emotions and not against them
Every year, around March, a curious social custom occurs in Japanese families. Parents of kids entering elementary school visit the grandparents and gingerly tread the topic of buying the kids a very expensive item: a randoseru. And gingerly they must tread. The randoseru, a Japanese school bag, costs a whopping
All the “C++ killers”, even these which I wholeheartedly love and respect like Rust, Julia, and D, help you write more features with fewer bugs, but they don't much help when you need to squeeze the very last FLOPS from the hardware you rent. As such, they don’t have a competitive advantage over C++. Or, for that…
Dmitrii Kovanikov writes posts about enterprise software development and functional programming, both entertaining and serious. I never used a functional programming language (such as Haskell or OCaml) at work, but several ideas from functional programming have become popular in mainstream general-purpose programming…
Some of the things I've learned over a decade of Git usage, and working on writing good commit messages.
A surprisingly innovative portable ST
Some humans put a ~2.4GHz magnetron on a ventilated metal box with a fancy door.
With the recent release of OpenBSD 7.5, I decided to run through my personal OpenBSD “installer” for laptop/desktop devices. The project is built off of the dwm tiling window manager and only installs a few basic packages. The last time I updated it was with the release of 7.3, so it’s been due for an minor rework.
Why TypeSpec is the best way to write OpenAPI
If you read my previous article on DOS memory models, you may have dismissed everything I wrote as “legacy cruft from the 1990s that nobody cares about any longer”. It's time to see how any of that carried over through the 16-bit to 64-bit evolution.
I have recently released an open source tool called sotrace . It maps out the .so dependencies for a binary or library, and presents th...
LLM chatbots can be engaged in endless "conversations" by considerably simpler text generation bots. This has some interesting implications.
I built a new plugin for my sqlite-utils CLI tool that lets you ask human-language questions directly of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files on your computer. It’s called sqlite-utils-ask. Here’s …
Taking a look at a Wireless Tank Mouse that I picked up from Sordan.ie and seeing how well it works with my Commodore computers.
A deep dive into evolutionary algorithms through the lens of low-poly image generation. This exploration covers genetic algorithm theory, custom Ruby implementation using the Petri Dish framework, and detailed analysis of genetic operators including roulette wheel selection, random midpoint crossover, and nudge…
William the Conqueror is one of those historical figures who need no introduction. Thanks to his famous victory at Hastings in 1066, he dra...
My currently understanding of types
A deep dive into my home grown cocktail recipe app which speaks Tailscale natively using tsnet, and serves up delicious drinks direct to your tailnet. Libations is built with Go, Nix and Vanilla Framework.
This post guides through decompiling Hyper-V Manager to rebuild it from source, aiming to assess its value for potential open-sourcing. It explores manual and automated decompilation processes, including troubleshooting and enhancing the tool, advocating for community-led improvements to this widely-used but neglected…
Telemedicine (and mobile health generally) accumulated a hunk of public mindshare during the pandemic emergency, but speaking as someone wit...
Low level software usually has lots of .cc or .rs files. Even lower-level software, like your cryptography library, probably has .S containing assembly, my least favorite language for code review.
Before the widespread existence of software repositories like CPAN, NPM, and PyPI, developers seeking to reuse an existing algorithm or library of routines would either check books or journals for code, or, they just might post a classified ad:
This is Bob. And I’d like to know the best way for us to code a bunch of models in JAX to use to evaluate parallel algorithms including normalizing flows. I’m going to dump out my current thinking, but I’m really hoping to get feedback from experts on the best way to do this without starting a flame war in the…
