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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,531 posts.

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1441

Light Table is in YCS12

I’m happy to announce that as of yesterday Light Table has joined a host of amazing startups for the Summer 2012 batch of YCombinator . Under the guidance of YC we believe we have the best possible chance to not just make Light Table a reality, but to help craft a new future for the way we create software.

1442

Write your own Excel in F# (2018)

Use Fable, Elmish architecture, parser combinators and the magic of functional-first programming with F# to build a simple browser-based spreadsheet application! I have been teaching F# for 7 years now and while the libraries and examples change, the core ideas remain the same. In this blog post, I'll cover my latest…

1443

Building a r/place in a weekend

On Friday I accepted a challenge to clone Reddit's /r/place in a weekend. And I did it, and its live, and its amazing: Being able to build this in a weekend isn't genius. Its possible because programming is made up of 2 activities: Making decisions (95%) Typing (5%) Reddit

1446

Timezone Bullshit

People often use short timezone abbreviations like EST and PST to refer to timezones. If you're doing this in a computer program, you are almost certainly making a huge mistake. Let's take take a look, using the disastrously bad unix libc timezone tools , which you're almost certainly using under the hood if you're…

1455

Thirteen Years of Bad Game Code

Alone on a Friday night, in need of some inspiration, you decide to relive some of your past programming conquests. The old archive hard drive slowly spins up, and the source code of the glory days scrolls by... Oh no. This is not at all what you expected. Were things really this bad? Why did no one tell you? Why were…

1459

Learning to code vs. learning to automate

Does anyone remember a few years ago, when the mayor of New York decided to learn to program? It was a heady time, because it wasn’t just him. I remember these surreal commercials where Miami Heat forward Chris Bosh was encouraging children to learn to code for the good of humanity or something. There was...

1462

How GPT3 Works – Visualizations and Animations

Discussions: Hacker News (397 points, 97 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (247 points, 27 comments) Translations: German, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Russian, Turkish The tech world is abuzz with GPT3 hype. Massive language models (like GPT3) are starting to surprise us with their abilities. While not yet…

1465

Emacs 29 is nigh

Table of Contents Major features Eglot is now part of Emacs core Tree-Sitter is also part of Emacs core Install packages from source with package.el Org mode 9.6 use-package in Emacs core Pure GTK Emacs is here for Wayland! Compile EmacsLisp files ahead of time Native access to SQLite databases HaikuOS support New…

1468

Non-determinism in GPT-4 is caused by Sparse MoE

It’s well-known at this point that GPT-4/GPT-3.5-turbo is non-deterministic, even at temperature=0.0. This is an odd behavior if you’re used to dense decoder-only models, where temp=0 should imply greedy sampling which should imply full determinism, because the logits for the next token should be a pure function of…