The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,668 posts.
One of my favorite blog posts about Rust is Things Rust Shipped Without by Graydon Hoare. To me, footguns that don't exist in a language are usually more important than expressiveness. In this slightly philosophical essay, I want to tell about a missing Rust feature I especially like: constructors.
Back before I first left the United States in 2012, I’d often use price comparison websites when trying to find parts for computers and system builds...
This was triggered by a recurring incident I faced where the Docker daemon was using 100% CPU on multiple cores that made the host effectively unusable.
With a few rolls of of duct tape and a craft knife, security guard Shuetsu Sato elevates the humble worksite sign to an art form.
In the past, gods and demons allowed us to talk about phenomena that we didn’t fully understand. During the Enlightenment, we tried to kill them and explain everything in reductionist scientific terms. But it feels to me like we’ve come full circle. We’re back to using oversimplified metaphors to wrap our minds around…
Pioneer paints a pretty picture of a fair tournament for ambitious people of the world. In reality though, the organizers will manipulate…
Silly, terrible, no-good very-bad jigsaw puzzles. Featuring Voronoi diagrams, KD-trees, and Clojure.
/ Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, \ \ prepare to die. (Klingon Proverb) / -------------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || || (Excerpt from Ansible for DevOps, chapter 12.) The fallout from this year's microSD card performance comparison has turned into quite a…
Interactive article explaining alpha compositing concepts.
A simple walkthrough of what RNNs are, how they work, and how to build one from scratch in Python.
Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection. Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.
At Google, our organization designs, owns, and maintains a number of optimization models that automate the planning of Google’s datacenter growth and health. As is pretty standard in supply chain optimization and planning, these models are often integer linear programs. It’s a core competency of operations research…
Nearly three dozen journalists at a broad range of major publications have been targeted by a far-right group that maintains a Deep Web database listing the personal information of people who threaten their views. This group specializes in encouraging others to harass those targeted by their ire, and has claimed…
Essay on the benefits of speedy software, and how it affects user perception of engineering quality and overall usability
I love the feeling of having a new way to think about the world. I especially love when there’s some vague idea that gets formalized into a concrete concept. Information theory is a prime example of this.
The PingCAP company, makers of the TiDB NewSQL database and the TiKV key-value store, have kindly made publicly available, as well as open-sourced, a set of training courses that they call the "PingCAP Talent Plan". These courses train programmers in writing distributed systems in the Go and Rust languages. They are…
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of mathematical physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum. Also a detailed discussion of his work and big discovery of a universal constant for functions approaching chaos via period doubling.
I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday: Here’s the full story on it. Yesterday I flew home from Spain, where I’d spent a week at the Celsius 232 festival in Aviles. It was a lovely time,…
The convoluted and ultimately pointless tale of how I connected a retro 80s 5" BW TV to my PC as a 3rd monitor
Drago — a nice example of a real-world binary tree This was the first post about my book on algorithms and Lisp. Writing it, actually, st...
This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. To make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by in-line text (the talk has ~120 slides; at an average of 20 kB per slide, that's 2.4 MB. If you think that's trivial…
What's the number one prerequisite to building a high-quality wardrobe? Exactly: You need to be able to recognize a quality garment when you see one. You need to be able to tell the difference between a durable, well-crafted piece and one that looks pretty on the rack but won't last more than half a
Some years ago someone asked whether it would make sense to switch Python to a PEG parser. (Or a PEG grammar; I don’t recall exactly what…
I'm the kind of person who reads encyclopedias front to back just for fun, and I've been fascinated by mathematical special functions at least since my first encounter with the gamma function as a teenager. My work implementing numerical and symbolic algorithms in mpmath , Arb and other software projects during the…
