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The Latest On Intelligence
You may remember The Bell Curve. The book was published in 1994 by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, and it argued that IQ is largely determined by genetics and little by the environment. It...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,098 posts.
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Twitter crashes itself with commas
The latest news about Opera web browsers, tech trends, internet tips.
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Computed goto for efficient dispatch tables
Recently, while idly browsing through the source code of Python, I came upon an interesting comment in the bytecode VM implementation ( Python/ceval.c ) about using the computed gotos extension of GCC [1] . Driven by curiosity, I decided to code a simple example to evaluate the difference between using a computed goto…
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Here’s to the Misfits
The school I went to in England used to proudly display their famous alumni in black and white photos circling the theatre lobby. From John le Carré, to John Cleese, the list included notable actors, top politicians and accomplished actors. What the school didn't tell admiring visitors though, is
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The Opposite of a Bloom Filter
A Bloom filter is a data structure that may report it contains an item that it does not (a false positive), but is guaranteed to report correctly if it contains the item (“no false negatives”). The opposite of a Bloom filter is a data structure that may report a false negative, but can never report a false positive…
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How your startup is getting lapped by companies who know how to hire
There will always be an excess of bad ideas and dumb money in the market--so we'll always be complaining about a lack of talent, no matter how many developers there are. Still, I contend that most companies have no idea how to hire, and in the last week, my theory got proved to me several times ov
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Here’s why we keep getting hacked – clear and present Billabong failures
It happened again last week. No, not Yahoo! Voices [https://www.troyhunt.com/2012/07/what-do-sony-and-yahoo-have-in-common.html], not the Phandroid Android forums [http://www.zdnet.com/android-forums-hacked-1-million-user-credentials-stolen-7000000817/] , not NVidia [http://www.zdnet.com/nvidia-confirms-
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Using Spotlight from the OS X Commandline
One significant productivity-enhancing feature that arrived with Tiger was Spotlight. On its own, it changed the way some (if not most) Mac...
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Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS
As steer and drplokta pointed out yesterday , the Nielsen diagram was grossly out of proportion, so it looked like RIM and MS were better than they were. I passed the data to steer, who then played around with R (code is in the other post), and produced the second diagram. I've tried to line them…
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Read the masters
Some time ago, I came across the Wikipedia article of Niels Henrik Abel , and something there burnt its way into my mind. Abel changed the face of mathematics, despite dying at 27. And here comes the thing – I give the mic to Wikipedia now:
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Vim Creep
It all started out innocently enough. You experimented with it once or twice in your first year of college, but Nano and Pico were easier—closer to what you had already been using during high school on the Windows machines and Macs. But as time went on and you got more experience under your belt in the college-level…
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My Senior Design Project: Node.js WiFi-Extending Robot
A wifi-deploying tank robot controlled with JavaScript/Node.js.
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UK anti-encryption law
There was some surprise in the comments of yesterday's post over the fact that the United Kingdom has effectively outlawed encryption: the UK will...
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Some things I've learnt about programming
I've been programming for over 30 years from machines that seem puny today (Z80 and 6502 based) to the latest kit using languages that rang...
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Pay Too Much for everything
Have you ever inherited something that's really old? When you held it, did you notice that it's different than what you can buy at the store today? Chances are your grandparents saved up for quite some time to buy it, and that’s why it’s lasted until now. Often something that costs twice as much doesn't