Evan Miller

Attention Is Off By One

Let’s fix these pesky Transformer outliers using Softmax One and QuietAttention.

How Not To Sort By Average Rating

Users are rating items on your website. How do you know what the highest-rated items are?

Four days of Go

Part of my work involves the mild reverse-engineering of binary file formats. I say “mild” because usually other people do all of the actual work; I just have to figure out what an extra flag field or two means, and I then take as much credit as possible for the discovery on my blog.

Why I'm Betting On Julia

The problem with most programming languages is they’re designed by language geeks, who tend to worry about things that I don’t much care for. Safety, type systems, homoiconicity, and so forth. I’m sure these things are great, but when I’m messing around with a new project for fun, my two concerns are 1) making it work…

Why I’m Learning Perl 6

Nothing! Just kidding, you’ll see a lot of distressed messages from tasks that passed out wait for the phone to ring, and woke up wearing someone else’s OS thread. 1

Statistical Formulas For Programmers

When someone says “7 is greater than 5”, you declare that they’re really the same.

Elixir RAM and the Template of Doom

I will attempt to convince you, in two lines of code, that Elixir is more interesting than any programming language you’ve ever used.

Why I program in Erlang (2012)

Erlang is a twenty-five-year-old programming language that has yet to win a popularity contest, and almost certainly will never win any medals for speed, let alone any tiaras for syntactic beauty. The language is slow, awkward, and ugly. Refactoring Erlang code is a pain.

The Mathematical Hacker

The programming profession is blessed with a number of gifted essayists. Today I will pick on three of my favorites — Eric Raymond, Paul Graham, and Steve Yegge — because they all seem to disagree about why (and whether) mathematics is relevant to the practicing programmer. Their attitudes might be summarized as:

A Review of Perl 6

[ Update , Feb. 5, 2020: Perl 6 is now called Raku. I’ve updated the review title, but left the review body intact. ]

Why I Develop For The Mac

UPDATE, 5/7/2013 : Some off-hand remarks in this article about HTML5 drawing speeds generated some controversy in the hackersphere. To read more, see Adrian Holovaty's post In Defense of <canvas> , and my response, Hackers and <canvas> .

A Taste of Rust

A review of Rust, the programming language built for safety – not necessarily for comfort.

How to Become a Software Contractor

The Other Money Problem

I admit to feeling a twinge of excitement last summer when I read that Paul Graham was leaving his jillion-dollar job to write more essays. It felt like the thinking man’s equivalent of LeBron James returning home to the Cleveland Cavaliers to play ball. I don’t know; it’s just a good human story when people decide to…

Deriving the Reddit Formula

A few things about Reddit’s hot formula have always bothered me. The formula has obviously been a success when it comes to setting the Internet on fire, but I have to wonder:

Type Punning Functions in C

C has a reputation for being inflexible. But did you know you can change the argument order of C functions if you don't like them?

Announcing Evan's Awesome A/B Tools

If you’ve ever needed to do basic statistical calculations for an A/B test, your options traditionally have been:

You can't dig upwards

When I first learned to drive a car, shortly after turning 15, my mother insisted that I learn on my father’s Mazda Miata: a silver, two-door convertible with a soft-top roof.

The Joy of Erlang; Or, How to Ride a Toruk (2011)

In the movie Avatar , there’s this big badass bird-brained pterodactyl thing called a Toruk that the main character must learn to ride in order to regain the trust of the blue people. As a general rule, Toruks do not like to be ridden, but if you fight one, subdue it, and then link your Blue Man ponytail to the…

The Floppy Disk of Floating Point

An essay that bids farewell to x87 – a computing architecture too long for this world.

Adventure Games and Eigenvalues (2017)

Do adventure games have dead ends? The author of The Teeny Tiny Mansion proves the absence of dead ends in that game via formal verification (in particular, with the help of the cbmc model-checking program ). Here I’ll demonstrate how to prove the same thing via Markov theory. The Markov approach requires more…

How Not To Run An A/B Test

Are you falling victim to the peeking problem? Learn how to design and run an experiment properly.