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Readings in distributed systems
This post is a work in progress.Inspired by a recent purchase of the Red Book, which providesa curated list of important papers around database systems, I’ve decidedto begin assembling a list of im...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,129 posts.
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The Logic of “Stupid” Poor People
We hates us some poor people. First, they insist on being poor when it is so easy to not be poor. They do things like buy expensive designer belts and $2500 luxury handbags. To be fair, this isn…
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Fixing Unix Filenames (2012)
This article will try to convince you that adding some limitations on legal Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames would be an improvement. Many programs already presume these limitations, the POSIX standard already permits such limitations, and many Unix/Linux filesystems already embed such limitations so it'd be better to make…
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Mac Pros, Ara, and Modularity
Early yesterday Motorola announced their ambitious Ara project - a modular phone with interchangable parts and features. In theory it sounds great - battery running low? Swap in a new one. Need a bigger camera for that trip you're going on? Pop one in - no need for that big DSLR.
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Principal Component Analysis for Dummies
(I recently wrote a new post that you may also find interesting called Principal Component Analysis 4 Philosophers) Having been in the social sciences for a couple of weeks it seems like a large am…
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The Battle for Power on the Internet
We’re in the middle of an epic battle for power in cyberspace. On one side are the traditional, organized, institutional powers such as governments and large multinational corporations. On the other are the distributed and nimble: grassroots movements, dissident groups, hackers, and criminals. Initially, the Internet…
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Cisco to release BSD-licensed H.264 stack
As I noted last year , one of the biggest challenges to open source software has been the patent status of video codecs. The most popular codec, H.264 , is patent-encumbered and licensed by MPEG LA , under terms that prevent distributing it with open source products including Firefox. Cisco has announced today that…
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Employment in America: WTF is going on?
The October 29, 2013 Ask The Headhunter Newsletter is the 500th edition. So rather than answer a reader’s question, I’m celebrating this milestone by making up my own question, and doing my best to answer it. (What? You don’t subscribe to the free, weekly e-mail Ask The Headhunter Newsletter? Don’t miss the next…
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Profit affects doctors' treatment decisions
There is little to no incentive in the healthcare industry to hold down costs. Worse yet, the rewards for performing unnecessary surgeries i...
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For modern development Javascript indeed is a shit language
This post was too inflammatory and abusive in nature, and I regret writing it. It did exist, and you can probably can find it using the web archive. UI is hard.
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Things that suck in AngularJS
Every once in a while, I find that someone is interested in AngularJS, but not sure if they should stick to their jQuery comfort zone or mak...
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The Median-of-Medians Algorithm
In this post, we consider the problem of selecting the \(i\)-th smallest element from an unsorted list of \(n\) elements. Somewhat surprisingly, there is an algorithm that solves this problem in linea
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Bloom Filters by example
A Bloom filter is a data structure designed to tell you, rapidly and memory-efficiently, whether an element is present in a set.
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Phishing with Linkedin's Intro
Security and Programming Blog
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Letter to a young programmer
Dear (insert name here), I heard you enjoy a certain programming language named Python. Programming is a wonderful activity. I am a little...
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The keys to the keydom
Your security and privacy on the Internet (to the extent that such quaint notions still have meaning) depend on the difficulty of factoring certain large numbers. For example, take this 1,024-bit integer: