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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,733 posts.

2023
992

Notes on training BERT from scratch on an 8GB consumer GPU

I trained a BERT model (Devlin et al, 2019) from scratch on my desktop PC (which has a Nvidia 3060 Ti 8GB GPU). The model architecture, tokenizer, and trainer all came from Hugging Face libraries, and my contribution was mainly setting up the code, setting up the data (~20GB uncompressed text), and leaving my computer…

995

Yarn 4.0

Today is the day! After more than a year of work, our team is excited to finally put a fancy "stable" sticker on the first release from the 4.x release line! To celebrate, let's make together a tour of the major changes; should you look for a more itemized list, take a look at the changelog.

1003

Not knowing the /proc file system

Overview Edit: this post was discussed on hacker news Some of the comments contained valuable reviews of the C code listed below. I’ve appended some edits after the original listing. I’ve been working quite with files and file systems on Linux recently. Mostly from the vantage point of either a shell or a python…

1004

JIT-optimized Ruby can outperform a C extension

YJIT’s ability to improve performance by adapting to run-time behavior can increase the speed of our code in a way that dropping down to C can’t. As such, I think we should reconsider the common wisdom that “rewriting our Ruby in C” is the ideal path to performance optimization and take a serious look at “rewriting…

1008

The pull request hack is fucking magic

I don't have time to keep up with all the daft Open Source projects I release. I wish my skill and my energy was as wide as my ambition. Several years ago, I came across Felix Geisendörfer's Pull Request Hack. The premise is simple - if people are making decent Pull Requests to your project then you should give them…

1015

Why Do ML on the Erlang VM?

Another question might be; why do machine learning at all? I'm not big into ML/AI though I've been poking it more recently as the open models, such as Stable Diffusion and the more practical Whisper, caught my curiosity. I have a very decent GPU (3090 Ti) and I've poked around a bit. I don't consider ML a super…

1016

Driving Compilers

I remember how pleasant it was to learn to program in C. There were so many good books explaining not only the language but also the standard library. I devoured both The C Programming Language (K&R) by Kernighan/Ritchie and The Standard C Library by P.J. Plauger. Then came Expert C Programming by Van der Linden and…