Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,842 posts.
Reinventing the Wheel: Discovering the Optimal Rolling Shape with PyTorch (2019)
It is thought that the wheel was invented more than five thousand years ago, yet modern machine learning tools were only developed in the past few decade...
Improving compression with a preset DEFLATE dictionary
A few years ago Google made a proposal for a new HTTP compression method, called SDCH (SanDwiCH). The idea behind the method is to create a dictionary of long strings that appear throughout many pages of the same domain (or popular search results).
Coalton Playground: Type-Safe Lisp in the Browser
I wanted to share a side project I’ve been tinkering with for a while and finally got around to shipping: Coalton Playground – basically a web-based REPL for Coalton, which is this inte…
File Descriptor Transfer over Unix Domain Sockets
Yesterday, I read a phenomenal paper on how disruption free release at Facebook.
Service Weaver: A Framework for Writing Distributed Applications
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and outreach programs for early career developers.
Exploit Information Leaks in Random Numbers from Python, Ruby and PHP
Space Cybersecurity has become a prominent topic in the news, particularly when it comes to protecting space-related assets and technologies.
Rebol vs. Lisp Macros
Author: HostileFork, Title: Rebol vs. Lisp Macros, Date: 19-Apr-2016, Length: 2220 words
JSON on the Command Line with Jq
A series of how to examples on using jq, a command-line JSON processor
Government Rails Site Hit Hours After CVE Patch
Rietta patched a government client's Ruby on Rails site within hours of a 9.5 CVSS ActiveStorage CVE. Exploit attempts began before business hours resumed.
Apple’s fix for corrupt binaries
Apple quietly fixed the apps affected by corrupt App Store binaries in an interesting way.
Smalltalk Envy
I myself was not on the famous C3 (Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System) project in 1996-2000 that is pivotal to ‘Extreme Programming’ (XP). That project used Smalltalk, and team contribution was provided by Object Technology International’s ENVY version control system. I wanted to know more about that so I…
Context Engineering for Agents
Patterns for managing agent context.
The Python GIL Visualized
In preparation for my upcoming PyCON'2010 talk on "Understanding the Python GIL", I've been working on a variety of new material--including some graphical visualization of the GIL behavior described in my earlier talk . I'm still experimenting, but check it out.
A new home for Python-build-standalone
Astral is taking stewardship of python-build-standalone, Gregory Szorc's foundational project for installing portable Python distributions.
A modern Fortran scientific programming ecosystem
Historically, large general-purpose libraries have formed the core of the Fortran scientific ecosystem (e.g., SLATEC , or the various PACKS ). Unfortunately, as I have mentioned here before, these libraries were written in FORTRAN 77 (or earlier) and remained unmodified for decades. The amazing algorithms continued…
Language Models, Word2Vec, and Efficient Softmax Approximations
The Word2Vec model has become a standard method for representing words as dense vectors. This is typically done as a preprocessing step, after which the learned vectors are fed into a discriminative model (typically an RNN) to generate predictions such as movie review sentiment, do machine translation, or even…
Fundamentals of Radiance Cascades
A deep-dive into the fundamental concepts/ideas behind Radiance Cascades.
Query-Based Compiler Architectures
What a query-based compiler is and what they are good for.
Debugging Lisp (2015)
This post is for all of the miscellaneous features that arent large enough to get their own individual posts. If you havent read all of them, here are the links to the previous posts on recompilation , inspection , class … Read the rest
Setting Up A New Machine for Ruby Development - as used at 37signals these days
It used to be a jarring experience to setup a new machine for development, but progress has paved the dirt road into a silky smooth autobahn. These are the tools we use today: Homebrew: Remember how painful it used to be to get imagemagick installed? Now it takes about a minute. “brew insta…
Doubling the speed of jpegtran with SIMD
It is no secret that at CloudFlare we put a great effort into accelerating our customers' websites. One way to do it is to reduce the size of the images on the website. This is what our Polish product is for.
Get started with GPU Compute on the web
This post explores the experimental WebGPU API through examples and helps you get started with performing data-parallel computations using the GPU.
CPU registers and OCaml
Even though registers are a low-level CPU concept, having some knowledge about them can help write faster code. Simply put, a CPU register is a storage for a...