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A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places
If you're still using this page, please email me at [email protected] and I'll send you a copy.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
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The cost of Go's panic and recover
TL;DR ¶ Some of the wisdom contained in Josh Bloch’s Effective Java book is relevant to Go. panic and recover are best reserved for exceptional circumstances. Reliance on panic and recover can noticeably slow down execution, incurs heap allocations, and precludes inlining. Internal handling of failure cases via panic…
2943
On DeepSeek and export controls
A few weeks ago I made the case for stronger US export controls on chips to China. Since then DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, has managed to — at least in some respects — come close to the performance of US frontier AI models at lower cost.
2944
JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
We replaced simple websites with complex apps nobody asked for. Now it takes a complex build pipeline just to change a headline.
2945
Space Truckin' – The Nostromo (2012)
“I was really influenced by three films,” Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979, on the subject of the Nostromo and its claustrophobic corridors. “Not so much in terms of Star…
2946
Not Buying American Anymore
I feel like I need to first defuse any idea of antagonizing Americans themselves. The people are never to blame. This isn't a post criticizing the American people, it's criticizing the state of things that makes it impractical to have any sort of economical relation with the country if you are an average Joe like me.
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The App Store was always authoritarian
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tariffs and an end to the spectre of…
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Xcode Constantly Phones Home
Building StopTheMadness Pro in Xcode is usually very fast, because my project doesn't use any Swift. It's a combination of Objective-C, which compiles much more quickly than Swift, and JavaScript, which doesn't need to be compiled. However, sometimes the builds were very slow for some strange reason. Checking the…
2950
Hilbert space: Treating functions as vectors
The tools of linear algebra are extremely useful when working in Euclidean space (e.g. \mathbb{R}^3 ). Wouldn’t it be great if we could apply these tools to additional mathematical constructs, such as functions and sequences? Hilbert space allows us to do exactly this - apply linear algebra to functions.
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Sorting algorithms with CUDA
Building on my previous post on sorting algorithms, I implemented the same algorithms using CUDA to explore performance improvements through parallel computing. The goal is to see how we can leverage the power of parallel computing to speed up our sorting algorithms. I went for a NVIDIA recruiting event some days ago…
2952
An Update on TinyKVM
Hey all. TinyKVM was open-sourced this february and since then I’ve been working on some things that are very much outside of the scope of…
2953
Scaffolding to Superhuman: How Curriculum Learning Solved 2048 and Tetris
Training gaming agents is an addictive game. A game of sleepless nights, grinds, explorations, sweeps, and prayers. PufferLib allows anyone with a gaming computer to play the RL game, but getting from “pretty good” to “superhuman” requires tweaking every lever, repeatedly.
2954
Bye, Mom
I get a text that my mom’s in the ICU.
2955
The JAWS shark is public domain
A story with legal drama, a mystery, snow leopards, and, uh, naughty bits.
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Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?
It’s unfortunately not uncommon for pedestrians to be killed by cars in the US.
2958
Golang's big miss on memory arenas
When your software team needs to pick a language today, you typically weigh two factors: language performance and developer velocity.
2959
Walled Gardens Can Kill
I'm an Apple ecosystem user, owning an iPhone ever since a past employer got it for me to test our company app some 8 years ago. Over time, as I've upgraded, I'
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The human only public license
A copyleft software license that restricts AI usage
2961
I wish people were more public
On sharing more of yourself.
2962
How much EU is in DNS4EU?
This is another post that started after several toots on mastodon. Most of the things presented here were already tooted by other people, but I think this is a good chance to write a mini tutorial about what to look at. We’ll use DNS, whois, BGP and your favourite search engine. What is DNS4EU? To quote the web page…
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A train-sized tunnel is now carrying electricity under South London
Electricity has started flowing through a deep-level tube train sized tunnel running through South London.
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A possible future of Python in the browser
My Python code was too slow, so I made it faster with Python. For some definition of “Python”.
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Shipping textures as PNGs is suboptimal
Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs? The goal of this post is to convince you that this is suboptimal, and walk you through a better approach.
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Zmij: Faster floating point double-to-string conversion
There comes a time in every software engineer’s life when they come up with a new binary-to-decimal floating-point conversion method. I guess my time has come. I just wrote one, mostly over a weekend: https://github.com/vitaut/zmij .
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Unparalleled Misalignments
This is a list of Unparalleled Misalignments, pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other. I've maintained this list since 2018; attributions (when known) can be seen on hover.
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Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse
How a video game company built an empire by inverting the playbook