The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,497 posts.
25 recent entries The horn of the Robert Smalls A difficulty in race-switching the Dukes of Hazzard On futile explanations Richard Blair Race-switching The Dukes of Hazzard Greek plural Erbaut Improved English-language month names I fix a thirty-year-old mistake Minced oaths? On the monobosom Partly about pie More…
In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it. But how can you read a lot of it if you don’t know what it means? In this article, instead of focusing on one or...
Throughout my career, though I’ve managed to be productive in aggregate, I’ve always sought to be more consistent in my productivity. How productive I am at a given moment seems driven …
This is the fourth…and LAST…entry in my series of blog posts analyzing the accuracy of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about what things would be like in 2019. These predictions come from hi…
Memories from Oxford days Mathematical Institute src Peter Neumann, Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s College, Oxford University, passed away two weeks ago. Last Monday would have been his …
People sometimes ask me for robotics resources. There aren’t many high quality internet-first lists available on this topic, so I made one I can link to. I’ll continually update this list so feel free to give suggestions if things are missing or you have better links .
Software is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996. Here’s what we had then, in chronological order: LISP, Algol, Basic, APL, Unix, C, SQL, O…
It was a weird year.
The number of researchers and peer-review publications is growing exponentially. It has been estimated that the number of researchers in the world doubles every 16 years and the number of research outputs is increasing even faster. If you accept that published research papers are an accurate measure of our scientific…
The world’s current and next innovations depend on a single country: Taiwan. It’s probably one country you might never hear about, or perhaps confuse with its neighbor, Thailand, or even think it’s a part of China. I’ve been living in Taiwan for 3+ years, and am baffled that I never pay attention to semiconductors…
I love when my current problem can be solved with a state machine. They’re fun to design and implement, and I have high confidence about correctness. They tend to:
A sparse matrix is a matrix that has a value of 0 for most elements. If the ratio of N umber of N on- Z ero ( NNZ ) elements to the size is less than 0.5, the matrix is sparse. While this is the mathematical definition, I will be using the term sparse for matrices with only NNZ elements and dense for matrices with all…
A browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer.
Using spaced repetition to create understanding
