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What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?
In 1843, Ada Lovelace published the first nontrivial program. How did it work?
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
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Is Lisp Still Unique? Or at Least Different? (2002)
October 1997: It has been six years since I finished Paradigms of AI Programming (or PAIP ), and now seems like a good time to look back at how Lisp and AI programming have changed.
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On Loneliness and Solitude
I discovered the existence of Lars Svendsen thanks to a forum discussion about - of all things - the modern apparel industry. One of the comments mentioned in passing his "Fashion: A Philosophy" and the idea of someone writing a philosophical analysis of Fashion intrigued me… so I checked out the book on Amazon. In…
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Introduction to Go Modules
Random thoughts
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This AI is bad at drawing but will try anyways
There was a paper recently where a research team trained a machine learning algorithm (a GAN they called AttnGAN) to generate pictures based on written descriptions. It’s like Visual Chatbot in reverse. When it was just trained to generate pictures of birds, it did pretty well, actually.
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Going FLOSS-only on Android
Someone recently asked me how my experience has been with a couple of ROMs I have tried on my Android phone. Which reminded me that I need to write a post de...
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Two player Karateka using a 42 byte patch
One of the first games I ever played on my family’s Apple IIe was the Jordan Mechner master work, Karateka . Fight the bad guys, save the princess – it’s a simple but classic formula. My brother and I would take turns making our way through Akuma’s fortress. Even then, we wanted a two player version.
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Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)
[Another submission from a former postdoc at one of the top ten universities in the U.S. The e-mail came to me as follows: "I read your b...
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A Nerd’s Way to Walk Up the Stairs (2011)
Mathematics, applications of mathematics to life in general, and my life as a mathematician.
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Regarding the Most Recent Amazon Mechanical Turk Data Contamination
Suggested Citation: Bai, H. (2018) Evidence that A Large Amount of Low Quality Responses on MTurk Can Be Detected with Repeated GPS Coordinates. Retrieved from: https://www.maxhuibai.com/blog/evidence-that-responses-from-repeating-gps-are-random
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Redux vs. The React Context API
React 16.3 added a new Context API – new in the sense that the old context API was a behind-the-scenes feature that most people either didn’t know about, or avoided using because the docs said to avoid using it.
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Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
The personal website and blog of Daniel Long Sockwell, a lawyer-turned-programmer with an interest in web development, open source, and making things as simple as possible.
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Never patterns, exhaustive matching, and uninhabited types in Rust
One of the long-standing issues that we’ve been wrestling with in Rust is how to integrate the concept of an “uninhabited type” – that is, a type which has no values at all. Uninhabited types are useful to represent the “result” of some computation you know will never execute – for example, if you have to define an…
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An EPYC NixOS Build Farm
Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup of build environments.
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Create a simple cross-platform desktop game with Go
A few months ago I fiddled around with writing Space Invaders using Go. I had a lot of fun writing it but the output only worked on iTerm2 because it used a specific feature of that terminal. In order to play the game you’d really have to download iTerm2 and run it on the command line. I thought it’d be fun to muck…
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How to Read 100s of Millions of Records per Second from a Single Disk
This article gives an overview of the implementation and performance of two recent additions to LocustDB, an extremely fast open-source analytics database built in Rust. The first addition is suppo…
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Poland was shockingly liberal during the 1400s
Zet Casino 2026: tysiące gier, bonus powitalny, wpłaty BLIK i krypto, wypłaty w minutach oraz polskie wsparcie 24/7. Sprawdź naszą ofertę.
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The Math Required for Machine Learning
For the past year, I’ve been working on implementing well known model architectures and building web applications, so I have a fair amount…
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24-core CPU and I can’t type an email
I wasn’t looking for trouble. I wasn’t trying to compile a huge project in the background (24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse), I was just engaging in that most mundane of 21st century tasks, wr…
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John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings
Programmers tend to worry too much and too soon about performance. Many college-level Computer Science classes focus on fancy algorithms to improve performance, but in real life performance rarely matters. Most real-world programs run plenty fast enough on today's machines without any particular attention to…
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A Sound Card Before Its Time
A mysterious full-length sound card recently arrived at the OS/2 Museum. It was clearly manufactured by IBM in 1985, and sports a 20 MHz Texas Instrument TMS32010 DSP (the DSP is the large black DIP chip near the lower left corner, not the ceramic gold cap chip).
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Modern SAT solvers: fast, neat and underused – part 2
The previous post in this series was a quick introduction to the world of SAT and SAT solvers. In this post, we will convert a harder real-world problem, namely _master-key system_, into SAT and explore some of the more advanced techniques used to efficiently convert problems to SAT.
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Traveling the World on a Third World Passport
Travel the world with a third-world passport: Embrace the unfairness and overcome limitations. Here's how I traveled the world with a Thai passport.
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Introduction to A* (1997)
Movement for a single object seems easy. Pathfinding is complex. Why bother with pathfinding? Consider the following situation:
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Twitter's Secret “Guest Mode”
Twitter has an undocumented feature which lets you follow accounts without being logged in. Here's how I found it, and how you can use it. My crappy old TV has a crappy old web browser on it. One boring Sunday, I decided to see which websites worked and which didn't on a 6 year old browser. Anything using LetsEncrypt…
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