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How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck? A Primer (2017)
Technology, startups, programming, technical management and software architecture
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,668 posts.
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Avoid Working Alone
Dear new developer, I suggest that the first job you take be the one with the highest learning potential, not the highest earning potential. (This post contrasts the two, in the context of entrepre…
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Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
A 2017 cartoon from this post. After the embargo update (Oct 25): Now that I have some answers from the people involved let me make a quick update: 1) I still find the paper unconvincing, specific…
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Deep Learning: Our Miraculous Year 1990-1991
Many of the basic ideas behind the Deep Learning Revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our "Annus Mirabilis" 1990-91
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Under-Investigated Fields
Nominations for fields that are not being researched as much as they should be
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Walkability a key factor determining upward mobility of a city's residents
Bipartisan Alliance, a Society for the Study of the US Constitution, and of Human Nature, where Republicans and Democrats meet.
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Principal Component Analysis
In the previous article in this series we distinguished between two kinds of unsupervised learning (cluster analysis and dimensionality reduction) and discussed the former in some detail. In this installment we turn our attention to the later. In dimensionality reduction we seek a function $f : \mathbb{R}^n \mapsto…
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Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
What did Oppenheimer mean when he famously said, "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds"? A foray into the Bhagavad-Gita.
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Pricing niche products
I recently visited a friend who runs Keycult , a business that designs and sells $500 keyboard kits.
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bliki: Strangler Fig
Inspired by the strangler figs in Australia, a strangler fig application gradually draws behavior out of its host legacy application
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Making My Own Glasses
A biohacking health story about making custom glasses after conflicting eye test results from two opticians and an eye doctor for a pilot’s license exam.
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Parsing C++ is literally undecidable (2013)
Many programmers are aware that C++ templates are Turing-complete, andthis was proved in the 2003 paper C++ Templates areTuring Complete.
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A Gentle Introduction to Bayes’ Theorem for Machine Learning
Bayes Theorem provides a principled way for calculating a conditional probability. It is a deceptively simple calculation, although it can be used to easily calculate the conditional probability of events where intuition often fails. Although it is a powerful tool in the field of probability, Bayes Theorem is also…
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Picolibc – Libc for Embedded Systems
I wrote a couple of years ago about the troubles I had finding a good libc for embedded systems , and for the last year or so I've been using something I called 'newlib-nano', which was newlib with the stdio from avrlibc bolted on. That library has worked pretty well, and required very little work to ship.
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Getting started with NodeGUI, a Qt-based library for desktop applications
A beginner’s guide to NodeGUI, an open-source library for building native desktop applications with JavaScript and CSS-like styling.
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What Is Good About Haskell?
Update 5/10/2019: check the bottom of this post for some links to comments and discussion.
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Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?
Social media companies have moderation SNAFUs on a near daily basis. Inevitably, the public and the tech press reacts with incredulity, “This company has so much money. How can they still be so bad…
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Do you have a problem? Write a compiler
These are notes of the talk I gave at ClojuTre 2019 . There is a video recording of the talk , and the slide deck as a PDF .
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How much faster is Redis at storing a blob of JSON compared to Postgres?
tl;dr; Redis is 16 times faster at reading these JSON blobs.*
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How a double-free bug in WhatsApp turns to remote code execution
In this blog post, I’m going to share about a double-free vulnerability that I discovered in WhatsApp for Android, and how I turned it into an RCE. I informed this to Facebook. Facebook acknowledged and patched it officially in WhatsApp version 2.19.244. Facebook reserved CVE-2019-11932 for this issue.
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A New R6RS Scheme Compiler
Some readers already know this and a few have suspected. I’ve been working on a new R6RS Scheme compiler for a while. Now I have released it as free software. Read on to learn the many wonderful drawbacks of this niche compiler.
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If You Want to Go Broke, Listen to a Billionaire
I see that the chairman of another major private equity fund has graced us with his wisdom on investing. I’ll summarize it for you:
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The Myth of Commoditized Excellence
Contents A New Idea Desire to Share Affirming Response The Naming The Movement Pressure for Simplification Fear of Stagnation Commoditizing the Excellence Crescendo of Disillusionment Conclusion A
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My God, It’s Full of Dots
Please click or tap in the gray square below. It will fill with a jolly tableau of colored disks—first big blue ones, then somewhat smaller purple ones, and eventually lots of tiny red dots.
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