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Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing
Edit: Part 2 of this post can be found here , and part 3 here . Most of the code used in these posts is available here .
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,307 posts.
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Mozilla shouldn't copy Chrome's permission prompt for extensions
As Mozilla’s Web Extensions project is getting closer towards being usable, quite a few people seem to expect some variant of Chrome’s permission prompt to be implemented in Firefox. So instead of just asking you whether you want to trust an add-on Firefox should list exactly what kind of permissions an add-on needs…
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Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans
This is the tale of what for me was a rather remarkable adventure. It was assembled on the basis of my personal recollection and experience, emails, GPS logs and some official documents. It represents solely the perspective and opinions of myself, in my more lucid moments. It is in no way intended to represent th
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Feynman on Fermat's Last Theorem
I write about Startups, coding and Physics
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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 2: Repairing the display
This post describes how we repaired the monitor from a Xerox Alto. The Alto was a revolutionary computer, designed in 1973 at Xerox PARC ...
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Google collects metadata from Android phones
[German]It seems that Google has established a surveillance function for Android phones. They are claiming the right, to collect and store meta data from incoming/outgoing phone calls and SMS from…
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Extracting Qualcomm's KeyMaster Keys – Breaking Android Full Disk Encryption
A security blog focusing on Android, the Linux Kernel and everything nice.
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The Daredevil Camera
Once upon a time I was reading a Popular Mechanics article, the title of which eludes me. Something about playing different music for different parts of a…
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What is Symbolic Computation?
I've been reading a lot of Lisp books lately, some more advanced than others. All of the introductory books I've seen cover the idea of symbolic computation, but most of them breeze past it with just a few pages about "symbols" and "quoting". For many programmers coming from non-Lisp languages these are new, foreign…
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Beamforming in PulseAudio
In case you missed it – we got PulseAudio 9.0 out the door , with the echo cancellation improvements that I wrote about . Now is probably a good time for me to make good on my promise to expand upon the subject of beamforming.
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From Losing Money to a Profit Margin in 5 Months
A few months ago I wrote about the difficulty of self-funding a rapidly growing startup. If you haven’t read that yet, go and do that now. I’ll wait. Here’s the quick timeline: JAN 2013 — Started on the idea for ConvertKit JUN 2013 — Reached $2,000 a month in recurring revenue (MRR). SEP 2014 — Revenue declines to…
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What happens when you try to publish a failure to replicate in 2015/2016
Anyone who has talked to me in the last year would have heard me complain about my 8-times-failure-to-replicate which nobody wants to publis...
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How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
This is a tutorial on how to implement a programming language. If you ever wrote an interpreter or a compiler, then there is probably nothing new for you here. But, if you're using regexps to “parse” anything that looks like a programming language, then please read at least the section on parsing . Let's write less…
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Jepsen: Crate 0.54.9 version divergence
In the last Jepsen analysis, we saw that RethinkDB 2.2.3 could encounter spectacular failure modes due to cluster reconfiguration during a partition. In this analysis, we’ll talk about Crate, and find out just how many versions a row’s version identifies.
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Fewer Than 1000 Brits Googled “What Is the EU?” After Referendum
I’ve never seen such snobbery in my life. The post-Brexit condescension has been nauseating. The media, pundits, and academics have desperately tried to paint the Brexit voters as ignorant, backwoods troglodytes who only voted to leave the EU because they don’t like brown people.
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The Brexit Possibility
Brexit’s downsides are clear; might tech help realize upsides in building something new based on a new world order?
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Introducing MLFE: ML-Flavoured Erlang
What ML-Flavoured Erlang is a statically typed language with basic parametric polymorphism (generics) for the Erlang VM that I’ve been hacking …
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The Moral Economy of Tech
This is the text version of remarks I gave on June 26, 2016, at a panel on the Moral Economy of Tech at the SASE conference in Berkeley. The other panel participants were Kieran Healy (whose remarks are here ), Stuart Russell and AnnaLee Saxenian .
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Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015)
It's really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim. Here are the last few instances of this that I've run across.
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10-Year Exercise Periods Make Sense
Scott Kupor at Andreessen Horowitz has a post today on some potential downsides of 10-year exercise periods for startup employees’ stock options. I’d recommend reading the whole thing for context here, but to summarize: * He argues that allowing employees who leave a company to keep their optio...
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Inappropriate Uses of Google Trends
Alternatively titled ‘Be aware of context, and maybe start using Google AdWords’ Instead
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How to Start Learning Deep Learning
Due to the recent achievements of artificial neural networks across many different tasks (such as face recognition, object detection and Go), deep learning has become extremely popular. This post aims to be a starting point for those interested in learning more about it.
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Twilio's Seed Pitch
I read yesterday evening that our portfolio company Twilio, which priced its IPO last night, is going to live code from the NYSE this morning. That brought a powerful flashback to the first time I met Jeff Lawson, founder and CEO of Twilio. It was 2008 in our old offices on the 14th floor of […]