The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,470 posts.
Ever since the first EC2 instances launched — the ones which were retrospectively named "m1.small" — Amazon has relied on the Xen hypervisor. No longer: C5 instances use KVM. This sounds like it would be a problem, but in fact that change didn't bother FreeBSD at all: Now that everything uses hardware-based paging…
Douglas G. Steigerwald joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara after completing an M.A. in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching focus on frontier econometric methods at the intersection of…
I co-founded PrepMe in 2001. We were one of the first education companies online and the first purely online, personalized platform. We were acquired in 2011 by Providence Equity-backed Ascend Lea…
A guide to Natural Language Processing (NLP): how to analyze text, extract information and understand documents written in a natural language
These days web assets such as JS and CSS aren’t simple text files. Instead, they’re typically minified or come from a complex build process involving compili...
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Apple has made many great laptops, but the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro (2012–2015) is the epitome of usefulness, elegance, practicality, and power for an overall package that still hasn’t been (and may never be) surpassed.
You may (or may not) have heard of or seen the augmented reality Invizimals video game or the Topps 3D baseball cards. The main idea is to render in the screen of a tablet, PC or smartphone a 3D mo…
I’m passionate about image performance optimisation and making images load fast on the web. One of the most interesting areas of…
It's common knowledge that Android device tend to be more out of date than iOS devices, but what does this actually mean? Let’s look at android marketshare data to see how old devices in the wild are. The x axis of the plot below is date, and the y axis is Android marketshare. The share of all devices sums to 100%…
This is a code-reading and exploration post about the WebSockets side of Phoenix. It builds upon some of the tracing techniques showcased in the previous post, to observe some of the internals of Phoenix. It also features some tricks I commonly employ to debug WebSocket related issues. The title and nature of this…
The current draft of the Senate Tax Reform Bill would tax stock options and RSUs upon vesting. Currently, stock options are taxed upon exercise and RSUs are taxed upon release of the underlying shares. This is a HUGE deal to everyone who works in companies that partially compensate their employees with these two…
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
9 months of daily A/B-testing of Google AdSense banner ads on Gwern.net indicates banner ads decrease total traffic substantially, possibly due to spillover effects in reader engagement and resharing.
I have previously reported that there has been a silent revolution in science where countries like China, India, South Korea... that previously contributed few research articles... have started to catch up and even exceed the productivity of the western world. The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US has…
Have you missed me? Trick question; I know you’ve missed me. Frankly, the main reason I haven’t been writing is laziness. I make no bones about it. The second reason is that I got hit b…
Generating a Universe with One Line of Code
The human eye is very sensitive; but can we see a single photon? The answer is yes: sensors in the retina can respond to a single photon. But neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously…
Recently, I reported a security issue in the new Firefox Screenshots feature (fixed in Firefox 56). This issue is remarkable for a number of reasons. First of all, the vulnerable code was running within the Web Extensions sandbox, meaning that it didn’t have full privileges like regular Firefox code. This code was…
