RL is more information inefficient than you thought
Recently, people have been talking about how it takes way more FLOPs to get a single sample in RL than it does in supervised learning. In pretraining, you get a signal on every single token you train on. In RL, you have to unroll a whole thinking trajectory that’s 10s of 1000s of tokens long […]
Ray Marching Soft Shadows in 2D
Disclaimer: the demos on this page use WebGL features that aren’t available on some mobile devices. A couple of weeks ago I tweeted a video of a toy graphics project (below). It’s not done, but a lot of people liked it which was surprising and fun! A few people asked how it works, so that’s […]
Linux Kernel Explorer
The kernel isn’t a process—it’s the system. It serves user processes, reacts to context, and enforces separation and control. The Kernel Is Not a Process: It’s the always-present authority bridging hardware and software. Serving the Process: Orchestrates syscalls, interrupts, and scheduling to keep user tasks running. System of Layers: Virtual, mapped, isolated, and controlled—structure at […]
Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving
I’ve been a part of this community for fifteen years. Despite the yearly bemoaning of HN’s quality compared to its mythical past, I’ve found that it’s the one community that has remained steadfast as a source of knowledge, cattiness, and good discussion. Thank you @dang and @tomhow. Here’s to another year.
Music eases surgery and speeds recovery, study finds
2 days ago ShareSave Soutik BiswasIndia correspondent ShareSave BBC Under the harsh lights of an operating theatre in the Indian capital, Delhi, a woman lies motionless as surgeons prepare to remove her gallbladder. She is under general anaesthesia: unconscious, insensate and rendered completely still by a blend of drugs that induce deep sleep, block memory, […]
Coq: The World’s Best Macro Assembler? [pdf] [2013]
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DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
Fourteen years ago, my storage needs outpaced my capacity and I began to look into building a network attached storage server. I had a few criteria in mind and was curious to see if anyone had _ recently_ shared something similar, but I couldn’t find anything that was relevant. In fact, I found that the […]
Functional Data Structures and Algorithms: a Proof Assistant Approach
A Proof Assistant Approach Tobias Nipkow, Jasmin Blanchette, Manuel Eberl, Alejandro Gómez-Londoño, Peter Lammich, Christian Sternagel, Simon Wimmer, Bohua Zhan Published by ACM Books This book is an introduction to data structures and algorithms for functional languages, with a focus on proofs. It covers both functional correctness and running time analysis. It does so in […]
Migrating the Main Zig Repository from GitHub to Codeberg
← Back to News page November 26, 2025 Ever since git init ten years ago, Zig has been hosted on GitHub. Unfortunately, when it sold out to Microsoft, the clock started ticking. “Please just give me 5 years before everything goes to shit,” I thought to myself. And here we are, 7 years later, living […]
The weirdest tool I own is also one of the most useful
The device has a 1080p HD camera with LED lights at the tip. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. I have a number of inspection cameras, and they’re fantastic for getting eyes into places that you normally can’t get to. But they’re typically large and bulky, designed for mechanics and HVAC […]