Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 415 posts.
"Emails show [Chris Cristie]'s aides did plan bridge gridlock," says Salon . To a transportation engineer, the aides are innocent: bridges can't have gridlock. While we often say "gridlock" to mean "bad traffic," it has a technical meaning.
Hello? is this thing on? I’m not sure if I even know how to operate this “blog” device any more. It’s been a year since my last post. I’m retired from blogging, remember? Want to hear something fun…
This is insane: more than 28,000 visitors came to read Part I of “HFT in my backyard”. Some of them are inevitably bots, but my logs reveal the majority to be human readers from bank desks, technol…
HFS+ is a terribly old filesystem with serious flaws. I sincerely hope that Apple comes with an update of the filesystem for WWDC 2015. After all they have been working on Swift for the past 4 years and we have just learned about it last week. HFS+ is seriously old HFS+ was released in 1998, in the era of Mac OS…
While on vacation, I’ve been working on an alternate type inference scheme for rustc. (Actually, I got it 99% working on the plane, and have been slowly poking at it ever since.) This scheme simplifies the code of the type inferencer dramatically and (I think) helps to meet our intutions (as I will explain). It is…
On the whole, I got a great response to my request for feedback about how YC could encourage female founders. It's clear there are two separate problems: 1) Some women already starting startups...
Today I switched over completely from GNU Screen to the more modern BSD-licensed alternative, tmux . After making sure that tmux had replacements for all Screen’s key features, I took the plunge, and haven’t looked back. The project’s webpage has a complete list of features available under tmux, but as an everyday…
So You Want To Write Your Own CSV code? Fields separated by commas and rows separated by newline. Easy right? You can write the code yourself in just a few lines.
An epic tale of deception, stolen artwork, and crappy logos
A blog about computer science, systems, technology, and sometimes vegan cooking.
A quick overview into wheel based Python deployments.
The issues of this pattern are now widely recognized, but what’s the real solution?
Since its release in December 2005, git has taken over the software industry. In combination with GitHub it is now a powerful tool to publish and share code: From big teams ( linux kernel , id Software , Epic Unreal ) to single individual ( Prince of Persia , Another world , Rick Dangerous ), many have adopted it as…
Self-examination for Seed and Series A startups
OK OK, I couldn't resist that title but it probably goes a bit far. Let me try for a little more nuance:
Programmers trying to make crypto run fast often say things like "Why can't the CPU designer just add a 128-bit multiplication instruction?" Sometimes these questions turn into academic papers analyzing the cycle counts that would be obtained from various instruction-set extensions. What's missing from most of these…
"Malleability" of Bitcoin transactions has recently become a major issue. This article looks at how transactions are modified, at the byte...
The web site has since been through various iterations and changes, therefore I include some screenshots below for posterity (because my design is much more beautiful than what is now online ;-).
Back to: The myth of heroism | Forward to: A footnote about the publishing industry
Broccoli is an asset pipeline for building JS+CSS apps running in the browser. Read about the architecture, and how it compares to other build tools.
I was in a Facebook discussion about “Friendly Artificial Intelligence” — this is a buzzword from the Singularity Institute people. They be...
Two interesting things in formally verified software happened recently. The big one was the release of SeL4 - a formally verified L4 microkernel. The second was much smaller, but closer to my usual scope: a paper which showed the correctness of sections of a couple of the assembly implementations of Curve25519.
