hackernews

1. On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV Total comment counts : 40 Summary This article discusses the use of Roman numerals on clocks and the unconventional notation of “4” as “IIII” instead of “IV”. It explains that this convention dates back to the late 14th century when King Charles V of France believed that “IV” brought bad luck because it subtracted 1 from his title, 5. The notation “IIII” was used in the Wells Cathedral clock in England and became conventional in the industry due to its visual balance on radial dial plates....

1. The Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary Total comment counts : 29 Summary A 2.5 million-acre region in southern Oregon, including Hart Mountain, Lake Abert, and Summer Lake, has been designated as the largest Dark Sky Sanctuary in the world. It was named the Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary by DarkSky International, an organization dedicated to preserving dark skies. The project is a collaboration between various officials, individuals, business owners, and tourism agencies....

1. Spreadsheets are all you need Total comment counts : 40 Summary The article discusses a low-code introduction to Large Language Models (LLMs) called “Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.” It explains that the implementation of the forward pass of GPT2 (a predecessor to ChatGPT) is done entirely in Excel using standard spreadsheet functions. The article mentions that this same Transformer architecture is used in various LLMs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard/Gemini. It provides a 10-minute demo video that walks through the high-level architecture of GPT2 and how it is implemented in an Excel spreadsheet....

1. JIT WireGuard Total comment counts : 20 Summary The article is about Fly.io, a company that uses WireGuard to make their system faster and more scalable. They have implemented WireGuard in unique ways, such as conjuring a TCP/IP stack for every instance of their CLI. However, they encountered two problems: unreliable message delivery with NATS and leftover WireGuard peers after running flyctl. To solve these issues, they decided to have gateways pull configurations from their API on demand instead of pushing them....

1. Cloning a Laptop over NVMe TCP Total comment counts : 36 Summary The author of the article purchased a new laptop and wanted to avoid the hassle of setting it up from scratch. Their colleague suggested copying the entire disk from the old laptop to the new one. The author explains the steps they took to accomplish this, which involved exposing the disk using NVME over TCP, connecting it over the network, and performing a full disk copy using the dd command....

1. (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) (2010) Total comment counts : 18 Summary This article discusses the importance and basic concepts of compilers and interpreters. It focuses on the syntax and semantics of Scheme programs and compares Scheme syntax to other programming languages. The article also introduces a simplified version of Scheme called the Lispy Calculator, which only uses five syntactic forms. It explains the allowable expressions in Lispy Calculator and describes what a language interpreter does, including the parsing component and the internal representation of the program....

1. S3 is files, but not a filesystem Total comment counts : 43 Summary The article discusses the differences between Amazon S3, a cloud filesystem, and the Unix file API. It explains that while S3 is often referred to as a filesystem, it is not a true filesystem and cannot replace one. The Unix file API is described as a “deep” module that handles a wide range of concerns with just five basic functions....

1. Monodraw Total comment counts : 43 Summary Monodraw is a text-based art creation tool that allows users to create diagrams, flow charts, and other visual representations using plain text. It supports exporting as images and offers features like entity-relationship diagrams, text banners, custom fonts, line tools, shapes, and alignment guides. Monodraw also includes a command-line interface and is designed specifically for macOS. Users can provide feedback via email or Twitter....

1. Fine tune a 70B language model at home Total comment counts : 42 Summary Answer.AI has released a fully open-source system that allows the efficient training of a 70 billion parameter language model on a regular desktop computer with gaming GPUs. This collaboration between Answer.AI, Tim Dettmers, and Hugging Face’s Titus von Koeller and Sourab Mangrulkar aims to make better models accessible to the open-source community. The system enables small labs to access large models and brings high-performance gaming GPUs, which are much cheaper than data center GPUs, into the training process....

1. Nikon to acquire RED Total comment counts : 26 Summary Nikon Corporation has announced that it will acquire RED.com, a company known for its digital cinema cameras, and make it a wholly-owned subsidiary. RED has been a pioneer in the industry and has earned accolades for its innovative products. The acquisition aims to combine Nikon’s expertise in product development and image processing with RED’s knowledge in cinema cameras, resulting in distinctive products for the professional digital cinema camera market....