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Beating C with Dyalog APL
wc utility in Dyalog APL
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,668 posts.
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Essential elements of good documentation
A comprehensive guide on how to write good documentation for your code and libraries
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Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off
Links:Google paper in NatureNew York Times articleIBM paper and blog post responding to Google’s announcementBoaz Barak’s new post: “Boaz’s inferior classical inferiority FA…
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How to not rewrite it in Rust
Once you get past the growing pains of the Borrow Checker and realise Rust gives you the power to do things which would be unheard of (or just plain dangerous) in other languages, the temptation to Rewrite it in Rust can be quite strong. However at best, the temptation to RiiR is unproductive (unnecessary duplication…
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Geometry, Algebra, and Intuition (2017)
I have a confession to make: I have always found symbolic algebra more intuitive than geometric pictures. I think you’re supposed to feel the opposite way, and I greatly admire people who think and communicate in pictures, but for me, it’s usually a struggle.
547
Our Dazzling Night Sky When the Milky Way Collides with Andromeda in 4B Years
This is what our night sky is going to look like in 3.9 billion years: Wow! So what’s going on here? Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at
548
An Introduction to Real-Time Subsurface Scattering
A little while ago I was doing some research into the state-of-the-art for approximating subsurface scattering effects in real-time (mainly for skin rendering), and I had taken a bunch of loose notes to help me keep all of the details straight. I thought it might be useful to turn those notes into a full blog post, in…
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Assange in Court
UPDATE I have received scores of requests to republish and/or translate this article. It is absolutely free to use and reproduce and I should be delighted if everybody does; the world should know what is being done to Julian. So far, over 200,000 people have read it on this blogsite alone and it has already […]
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Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth
A long long rant about my continued frustration with today's Apple. Nothing new, really.
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The next big thing will start out looking like a toy (2010)
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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The Internet and the Third Estate
Mark Zuckerberg suggested that social media is a “Fifth Estate”; in fact, social media is a means by which the Third Estate — commoners — can seize political power. Here history matters…
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The invented Chinese names of the 2019 Canadian federal election – ranked
It’s been a long, confusing, exhausting federal election season. We’re all tired. But put aside your worries, fellow citizens; it’s time for the invented Chinese names of the 2019 Canadian federal …
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63 Cores Blocked by Seven Instructions
I seem to have a habit of writing about super powerful machines whose many cores are laid low by misuse of locks. So. Yeah. It’s that again. But this one seems particularly impressive. I mean, how …
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Client-side web programming in Haskell: A retrospective
At the beginning of this decade (2010), a few of us Haskellers were exploring how best to do client-side web programming. We didn’t want to write JavaScript. There’s a surprising number of techniques we tried to avoid doing so. There was work coming from academia and industry. Here’s a history of my own experience in…
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Yes, Estimate Software Projects
I hear more voices saying [https://hackernoon.com/the-myth-of-software-time-estimations-576a7466d91a] there is little point in doing time-based estimations on how long building software will take, and thus we should just stop doing it. "Let's just use story points and estimate complexity, but not
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A Forty Year Career
The Silicon Valley narrative centers on entrepreneurial protagonists who are poised one predestined step away from changing the world. A decade ago they were heroes, and more recently they’ve become villains, but either way they are absolutely the protagonists. Working within the industry, I’ve worked with quite a few…
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Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
David analyzes the root causes of the Boeing 737 Max crash. Read here.
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Compiling my own SPARC CPU inside a cheap FPGA
Compiling a CPU, in a cheap FPGA board
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Lesser Known Coding Fonts
In the past few months, I’ve become interested—fascinated even—by programming fonts. As programmers we look at text all day: code, logs, command outputs, monitoring tools, etc. If we’re going to be looking at text all day, we might as well make it easy and pleasant for our eyes to read that text.
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Weaponizing and Gamifying AI for WiFi Hacking: Presenting Pwnagotchi 1.0.0
This is the story of a summer project that started out of boredom and that evolved into something incredibly fun and unique. It is also the story of how that p…
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ET Don't Phone Home
I recently became aware of this article where a Google exec says - he’s serious - that ‘Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded’. That’s assuming the owners themselves are even aware of what these devices are doing, and the likely truth is that they do not. Like needy…
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ML From Scratch, Part 1: Linear Regression
To kick off this series, will start with something simple yet foundational: linear regression via ordinary least squares. While not particularly exciting, linear regression finds widespread use both as a standalone learning algorithm and as a building block in more advanced learning algorithms.
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Are Aerospike Engines Better Than Traditional Rocket Engines?
Today we’re going to look at the history of aerospike engines, go over how nozzles work including things like overexpansion, underexpansion and even expansion ratios, we’ll look at the pros and cons of the aerospike, the physical limitations and problems, then we’ll compare the aerospike to some other traditional…
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Earth and Sun
Interactive article about Earth and Sun.
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Coffee Is Hard
Way back in the 80s, some people had a dream of combining the cutesy graphics of 80s visual games and the soul-crushing difficulty of 80s text adventures. And so Sierra On-Line created quest games.