1081
Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a classic text that's had a strong influence on countle...
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
1082
EnclaveDB: A secure database using SGX
EnclaveDB: A secure database using SGX Priebe et al., IEEE Security & Privacy 2018 This is a really interesting paper (if you’re into this kind of thing I guess!) bringing together the security…
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Augmenting Long-term Memory
One day in the mid-1920s, a Moscow newspaper reporter named Solomon Shereshevsky entered the laboratory of the psychologist Alexander Luria. Shereshevsky's boss at the newspaper had noticed that Shereshevsky never needed to take any notes, but somehow still remembered all he was told, and had suggested he get his…
1085
The Whole of WordPress Compiled to .NET Core and a NuGet Package with PeachPie
Why? Because it's awesome. Sometimes a project comes along that is impossibly ...
1086
Testing Memory Allocators: ptmalloc2 vs. tcmalloc vs. hoard vs. jemalloc
Quote: if you DO want to get performance from changing mallocs, make sure to test them with your own app Another Quote: in our humble opinion, overall winner...
1087
Important database news from the last few months
Google and Amazon acknowledge benefits of SQL, Elasticsearch introduces SQL interface, and MySQL finally becomes modern…after 20 years. These are exciting times in the world of databases.
1088
Mastodon WTF timeline (2017)
In the last few days I've been fortunate to witness an interesting chapter in the Internet's history, and I'm trying to compile a timeline of what has happened while the memories are still reasonably fresh. This is incomplete and a work in progress; I'll be updating it, and n...
1089
Running JRuby on the Graal JIT
Hello, friends! Long time no blog!I'm still here hacking away on JRuby for the benefit of Rubyists everywhere, usually slogging through compatibility fixes and new Ruby features. However with the release of JRuby 9.2, we've caught up to Ruby 2.5 (the current release) and I'm spending a little time on performance.I…
1090
Fixing bufferbloat on your home network with OpenBSD 6.2 or newer
My home network (which is also my work network) is a standard-issue Comcast cable hookup. In spite of a tolerable 120 megabits down, my experience of daily Internet use is regularly frustrating. Video streams and video chats drop in quality...
1091
Review of the Purism Librem 13
Towards the end of last year, I got a new laptop: the Purism Librem 13. It replaced the Lenovo ThinkPad X250 that I was using previously, which maxed out at 8 GB RAM and was beginning to be unusabl…
1092
Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can
Today, I found this email from Google in my inbox: We routinely review items in the Chrome Web Store for compliance with our Program policies to ensure a safe and trusted experience for our users. We recently found that your item, “Google search link fix,” with ID: cekfddagaicikmgoheekchngpadahmlf, did not comply with…
1093
Designing an email-only Slack interface
On the design of Stop Slacking , which lets you interact via email with the poor souls trapped in the endless, no-agenda meeting that is Slack.
1094
“Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history
Before it became a covert surveillance tool disguised as an outstanding browser extension, Stylish really was an outstanding browser extension. It bestowed upon its users nothing less than the power to change the appearance of the internet. Its extensive bank of user-made skins gave bright websites a dark background…
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Rules of optimization
Rules of optimization: 1) Design for performance from day 1 2) Profile often 3) Be vigilant on performance regressions 4) Understand the data 5) Understand the HW 6) Help the compiler 7) Verify your assumptions Performance is everyone's responsibility https://t.co/CwwJffnHGz
1097
The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
How to deal with ideological censorship in a community? Who gets empathy and who is humanized the most? Does contemporary rhetoric about toxicity hold up to scrutiny? “When you keep rewarding…
1098
Conservation of Intent: why A/B tests aren’t as effective as they look
When a +10% isn’t really a +10% OK, this is an infuriating startup experience: You ship an experiment that’s +10% in your conversion funnel. Then your revenue/installs/whatever goes up by +10% right?
1099
Perhaps it is simpler to say that Intel was disrupted
Disruption is simple to say but there many factors at play. Disruption is never one feature, but a full set of assumptions that go into a…
1100
Pipelines – a guided tour of the new IO API in .NET
Pipelines - a guided tour of the new IO API in .NET, part 1 (part 2 here) About two years ago I blogged about an upcoming experimental IO ...
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1102
Haskell’s State monad is not a monad (2014)
Haskell’s State monad has a shameful secret. It’s not a monad [ State monads don’t respect the monad laws in Haskell, Simon Marlow ] . Look:
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1104
Blocked by JSConf.eu Twitter account
Some people are probably pretty used to various blocking endeavours on social media. I am not one of them…
1105
Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C
A pointer references a location in memory and dereferencing a pointer refers to the lookup of the value of the memory location the pointer references. The value of a pointer is a memory address. The C standard does not define the representation of a memory address. This is crucial since not every architecture makes…
1106
A New Angle on L2 Regularization
Deep neural networks have been shown to be vulnerable to the adversarial example phenomenon: all models tested so far can have their classifications dramatically altered by small image perturbations . The following predictions were for instance made by a state-of-the-art network trained to recognize celebrities :
1107
There was a time when search engines were a thing, and it seems they still are
There was a time when search engines were a thing. And it seems they still are
1108
C2rust vs. Corrode
A couple weeks ago, Galois and Immunant launched c2rust. Since I wrote one of the best-known C-to-Rust translation tools (Corrode), and since I worked for Ga...
1109
Why I use the IBM Model M keyboard that is older than me
The last primary keyboard I’ll use in my life might be the IBM Model M. It’ll probably last me the decades to the day that keyboards should become obsolete. - Kheng Meng, 2018 I just had to start my blog post with that self quote ^^^ but I’m pretty confident it’ll hold true for me. I have owned several keyboards so…
1110
Lost in Math
Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book Lost in Math should be starting to appear in bookstores around now. It’s very good and you should get a copy. I hope that the book will receive a lot of a…