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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,981 posts.
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The Traveling Salesman with Simulated Annealing, R, and Shiny
I built an interactive Shiny application that uses simulated annealing to solve the famous traveling salesman problem. You can play around with it to create and solve your own tours at the bottom of …
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Apple Watch: Initial Thoughts and Observations
I think Apple Watch prices are going to be shockingly high — gasp-inducingly, get-me-to-the-fainting-couch high — from the perspective of the tech industry. But at the same time, there is room for them to be disruptively *low* from the perspective of the traditional watch and jewelry world.
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Pipes and Filters
Pipelines are an extremely useful (and surprisingly underused) architectural pattern in modern software engineering. The concept of using pipes and filters) to control the flow of data through...
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Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
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Burn Baby Burn
Andy sent me a WSJ piece with Bill Gurley yesterday. I don’t like to link to paid content so here’s a good Business Insider summary of the article that is open for anyone to read. Regular readers know that I’m a huge fan of Bill’s. He’s as smart as they come and I generally agree with him […]
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1. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown
TOF once wrote an article entitled "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle" which described the century-long progress f...
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Comparing Floating Point Numbers, 2012 Edition
This post is a more carefully thought out and peer reviewed version of a floating-point comparison article I wrote many years ago. This one gives solid advice and some surprising observations about…
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What every computer programmer should know about floating point, part 1
Author’s note: this article used to be called “What Every ComputerProgrammer Should Know About Floating Point, part 1”. Some peoplenoted that this was perh...
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Applying to YC
One of the most common misconceptions startups have about applying to Y Combinator is thinking that they are too early or too late. We have funded companies with only an idea; we’ve funded...
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TSA's X-Ray Nude Body Scanners Output 50% More Radiation Than Admitted to by TSA
A few weeks ago, scientific researchers from top universities released a report confirming my 2012 demonstration that anything can be easily smuggled through the TSA’s nude body scanners. Whi…
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I’m tired. So I’m selling my game that just went viral
Hacker Experience is an online hacking simulation game. Read more about it here.
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Wifi: “beamforming” only begins to describe it
[Note to the impatient: to try out my beamforming simulation, which produced the above image, visit my beamlab test page - ideally in a brow...
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Melting aluminum
Today another in my ongoing, seldom-updated series of posts about building my own backyard foundry. Today I’ll describe how the final step works: actually melting and pouring the metal. First…
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Linux perf rides the rocket
Kernel Line Tracing: Linux perf Rides the Rocket
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There are no B players
“Only hire A players! Fire the B players!” “If you hire B players, then they will hire C players!” “Over time, the A players will get frustrated with the B players and will leave to go to other companies and you’ll be left only with B and C players,
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iPhone 6 and Android value
The new iPhones were much the most predictable part of Apple's event - widely leaked and impelled by an irresistible logic - the customer is always right. For all that Apple thought and argued that you should optimize for the thumb size, it turns out optimizing for the pocket size is a better metr
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D’s Garbage Collector Problem
One of the biggest issues with Higgs, the JIT compiler I’m working on, is that the compilation times are too slow. The performance of the compiled machine code that Higgs produces is now fair…
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Link-time optimization in GCC, part 3 – LibreOffice
After Firefox , I decided to look into LibreOffice performance with link time optimizations (LTO) and profile feedback (FDO). This post was ...
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