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Our Brains Are Not Multi-Threaded
In computer programming, it’s common to split your program into multiple different threads that run simultaneously, as this often simplifies application design. Imagine, for example, ... Read more
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,668 posts.
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Absolute Scale Corrupts Absolutely
The Internet has gotten too big. Growing up, I, like many computery people of my generation, was an idealist. I believed that better, faste...
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Deterministic thinking: a problem in how we think, not just in how we act
– Basketball Stats: Don’t model the probability of win, model the expected score differential.
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Positional Scarcity
Each day on Tech Twitter, we get up in the morning, open up the website, and then go see what it is we’re mad about. A few days ago, it was this: The concept of “pay to get a better place in l…
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Time to Abolish "Statistical Significance"?
The idea of "statistical significance" has been a basic concept in introductory statistics courses for decades. If you spend any time lookin...
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The exponential function is a miracle
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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A Million Digits of Pi in 9 Lines of JavaScript
"Big integers" have landed in Javascript, at least in Firefox and Chrome. One of my favorite things to do with high precision arithmetic is to calculate digits of π. From scratch, that is, using only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
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The Rise of the Electric Scooter
In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it’s not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much, right? On an electric
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What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
I replayed Warcraft III recently and was looking for other games I could play in the same genre. Turns out that outside of StarCraft 2, there are no recent games that are anywhere near as good. Wha…
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Dungeon crawling or lucid dreaming?
I’ve done several experiments with a text-generating neural network called GPT-2. Trained at great expense by OpenAI (to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars worth of computing power), GPT-2 learned to imitate all kinds of text from the internet. I’ve interacted with the basic model, discovering its abilities to…
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Dissatisfied with Docker
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
These candidates were assessed on a variety of axes, most importantly Community Participation Guideline enforcement and accessibility, but also including team requirements from engineering, organizational-values alignment, usability, utility and cost. To close out, I’ll talk about the options we haven’t chosen and…
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Compensation in 2019 – new grad tech offers
Analyzing compensation packages from 2019 new-graduate technology job offers.
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NY Payroll Company Vanishes with $35M
MyPayrollHR , a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people…
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I revoked $1M worth of EV certificates
Personal like or dislike of EV aside for a moment, we can all agree on what the name of EV certs implies. Organisations get their company details in the certificate and CAs have to do some extended validation of that data compared to a normal certificate. Turns out, that doesn'
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The iPhone and Apple's Services Strategy
Apple’s annual iPhone event may have marked Apple’s true shift into being a Services company
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Metronomes in JavaScript
Monica Dinculescu's blog
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Bring Back the SE
Today Apple is going to announce three new iPhones. One of them should be a small form factor like the old SE. Apple discontinued the iPhone SE at the tail end of 2018 and has stated that the next iOS update will not run on the old SE hardware. I have a number of friends […]
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Technical Breakdown of a new NES game written in Lisp
What Remains is a narrative adventure game for the 8-bit NES video game console, and was released in March 2019 as a free ROM, playable in emulator. It was created by a small team, Iodine Dynamics, over the course of two years of on and off development. It’s currently in the hardware phase as a limited batch of…
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It’s not just p=0.048 vs. p=0.052
Peter Dorman points to this post on statistical significance and p-values by Timothy Taylor, editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, a highly influential publication of the American Economic Association.
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Why Positive Cashflow Matters
Venture backed companies have a strange relationship to positive cashflow. Because they have financial backers who can and do finance losses, they tend to operate in the red for a long time. In the early days it makes sense to burn cash. If you do not have revenues, you can’t generate cash. And if you […]
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Hugo and IPFS: how this blog works (and scales to serve 5k% spikes instantly)
Learnings from real-world experience with IPFS, and the curious stack that powers this website
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Popcount CPU instruction
Most CPU architectures in use today have an instruction called popcount , short for “population count”. Here’s what it does: it counts the number of set bits in a machine word. For example (assuming 8-bit words for simplicity), popcount(00100110) is 3 and popcount(01100000) is 2 .