Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,808 posts.
I ‘ve done such a thorough job of de-Googling that I forgot to show up for a meeting with someone, because I hadn’t checked my Google calendar in ages. (No, they were not amused.) In my defense, I proceeded to explain to them that having de-Googled, I was also in the process of de-Appling, which is a special bonus…
As a relatively new member of adult society, and an absolute infant of the business world, I didn't think much about bank choice. I figured: you put money in, you take money out, they're all the same. I also figured a local branch of a global bank is just a fungible tentacle of the giant banking machine, so also…
Yesterday at lunch a friend asked me what tech trend he should pay attention to but was probably ignoring. Without thinking much I said “artificial intelligence”, but having thought about that a...
Engineers at MIT and NREL have developed a heat engine with no moving parts that is as efficient as a steam turbine.
Motivation For a moderately security conscious geek like myself, there can be a number of reasons to want to set up a home VPN server: Accessing your home computer via screen sharing without exposing it to the Internet (and thereby to potential evil-doers). Accessing servers with IP white lists (common case for…
In the past few weeks, governments around the world have renewed their efforts to restrain free expression online. In Canada, a revised "Online Streaming Act" comes as the latest in a long-running attempt to bring streaming under a restrictive regulatory regime. In the UK, a new "Online Safety Bill" seeks to censor…
Product-minded engineers are developers with lots of interest in the product itself. They want to understand why decisions are made, how people use the product, and love to be involved in making product decisions. They're someone who would likely make a good product manager if they ever decide
On 26 Nov 2019 at 14:55 UTC, I logged into my server that hosts my website to perform a simple maintenance activity. Merely three minutes later, at 14:58 UTC, the domain name susam.in used to host this website was transferred to another registrant without any authorisation by me or without any notification sent to me…
Learn the basics of Awk, a powerful text processing tool, in this informative article. Discover how to use Awk to manipulate and analyze data, calc...
A quick refresher on the maths behind LLMs: vectors, matrices, projections, embeddings, logits and softmax.
I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheet programs like Microsoft’s Excel, Apple’s Numbers and Google Sheets are the secret heroes of our civilization.
A simple explanation of how they work and how to implement one from scratch in Python.
We are very sad to say that James Randi passed away yesterday, due to age-related causes. He had an Amazing life. We will miss him. Please respect Deyvi Peña’s privacy during this...
Designing a cheap synthetic aperture radar mounted on FPV drone.
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
Hi, I’m Varun. I have a server in my room. Actually, I have two of them. And I write a ton of my own code for them. And I love it. This is a story documenting my homelab’s quiet beginnings, its spiralling evolution, and its uncertain future.
Credit cards make money through net interest, interchange, fees, and marketing contributions.
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
A guide describing what I learned about Windows and the Windows kernel in my first week at Microsoft.
This is the second part of my ongoing self-education in how to adapt my programming experience to a world with computers that talk. The first part, How I program with LLMs , covered ways LLMs can be adapted into our existing tools (basically, autocomplete) and how careful prompting can replace traditional web search…
From rate limits to no limits: How IPv6's massive address space and a crafty botguard bypass left every Google user's phone number vulnerable
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
Google said this week it is expanding the types of data people can ask to have removed from search results, to include personal contact information like your phone number, email address or physical address. The move comes just months after Google rolled out a new policy enabling people under the age of 18 (or a…
I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes
At work, one of the things I do pretty often is write print generators in HTML to recreate and replace forms that the company has traditionally done handwritten on paper or in Excel. This allows the company to move into new web-based tools where the form is autofilled by URL parameters from our database, while getting…
