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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 466 posts.
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Image Kernels explained visually
An image kernel is a small matrix used to apply effects like the ones you might find in Photoshop or Gimp, such as blurring, sharpening, outlining or embossing. They're also used in machine learning for 'feature extraction', a technique for determining the most important portions of an image. In this context the…
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Be careful about what you dislike
Observations about the problem of having strong opinions and sharing them with others.
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Tools for thought: graphical algebra and Fourier analysis
" I think a lot of mathematics is really about how you understand things in your head. […]
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Extracting Qualcomm's KeyMaster Keys – Breaking Android Full Disk Encryption
A security blog focusing on Android, the Linux Kernel and everything nice.
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Be Careful with Python's New-Style String Format
Some general warnings about the use of str.format in Python.
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A beginner's guide to Big O notation (2009)
Thoughts on software engineering from Rob Bell
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Don't Read the Comments
I sent this email to the current YC batch this morning: I've talked to some of you who are really bummed about negative press coverage or online comments about your company. Often this takes...
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Curl Security Audit
"the overall impression of the state of security and robustness of the cURL library was positive." I asked for, and we were granted a security audit of curl from the Mozilla Secure Open Source program a while ago. This was done by Mozilla getting a 3rd party company involved to do the job and footing … Continue…
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What Happened at the Satoshi Roundtable
Last weekend I attended the Satoshi Roundtable conference along with Charlie Lee and about 70 other members of the bitcoin community.
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The rectangularness of countries
What is the most rectangular country?
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Deep Learning Is Easy – Learn Something Harder
Caveat: This post is meant address people who are completely new to deep learning and are planning an entry into this field. The intention is to help them think critically about the complexity of the field, and to help them tell apart things that are trivial from things that are...
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How to Crash Systemd in One Command
After running this command, PID 1 is hung in the pause system call. You can no longer start and stop daemons. inetd-style services no longer accept connections. You cannot cleanly reboot the system. The system feels generally unstable (e.g. ssh and su hang for 30 seconds since systemd is now integrated with the login…
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Why Clojure? (2010)
I have recently become quite an enthusiast for the language Clojure . But why? Why would someone who has spent the last 30 years programmi...
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Free Transactional Email Services – The Best Alternatives to Mandrill and Co
Round-up and comparison of several popular and free transactional email services and Mandrill alternatives.
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The Beauty of Roots (2011)
Around 2006, my friend Dan Christensen created a fascinating picture of all the roots of all polynomials of degree ≤ 5 with integer coefficients ranging from -4 to 4:
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Grading Trudeau on quantum computing
Update (4/19): Inspired by Trudeau’s performance (which they clocked at 35 seconds), Maclean’s magazine asked seven quantum computing researchers—me, Krysta Svore, Aephraim Steinb…
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Unexecute
This here is the epitome of craziness. I could very well give up my search for more scary things in Emacs because I very much doubt I’ll find anything more fear-inducing, but first of all, let’s explain what’s wrong with it. Unlike my previous examples it’s not something I can show you by just pointing at code…
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The limitations of Android N Encryption
Over the past few years we’ve heard more about smartphone encryption than, quite frankly, most of us expected to hear in a lifetime. We learned that proper encryption can slow down even sophi…
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Best Practices for Time Travelers (2003)
When John Titor first showed up on IRC chat in October of 2000, he was enjoying a neat kind of double billing - as his 38-year-old self sat downstairs in the kitchen, typing away, a two-year-old version of himself lay sound asleep upstairs in bed. The elder Titor had been sent back in time by the U.S. Army, which…
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