1411
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,981 posts.
1412
1413
Low-level is easy
My previous entry has the amazingly interesting title "Blogging is hard". Gee, what a wuss, says the occasional passer-by. Gotta fix my image, fast. Think, think, think! OK, here's what I'm going to tell you: low-level programming is easy. Compared to higher-level programming, that is. I'm serious.
1414
Recreating the THX Deep Note
We dissect the building blocks of the infamous THX Deep Sound and recreate it by synthesizing the sound in Supercollider programming environment.
1415
1416
Say “no” to import side‐effects in Python
When you write Python code, please make sure that you don’t have side‐effects in your module imports. It breaks things and makes people sad.
1417
1418
The Idiot's Guide to High Frequency Trading
First, let me say what you read here is going to be wrong in several ways. HFT covers such a wide path of trading that different parties participate or are impacted in different ways. I wanted to put this out there as a starting point . Hopefully the comments will help further educate us all
1419
Michael Lewis: shilling for the buyside?
Journalism, in the ideal world, is supposed to inform the citizenry of facts important to their well being. Modern journalism seems to involve issuing press releases from the oligarchical reptiles …
1420
1421
American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-trap" is clicked
The society (closed access) journal ‘Copeia’ also has these spider trap links in it’s HTML, e.g. on this contents page: http://www.asihcopeiaonline.org/toc/cope/2013/4
1422
1423
Don't use assembly unless you're an expert
…unless you're an expert at assembly, that is. The title of this post was obviously meant to be an attention-grabber, but it is much truer t...
1424
Japanese Toilets: The Future Called 30 Years Ago
Japan circa 2006 I stare at the strange looking symbols with trepidation. Fear mixed with equal doses of excitement, is this the time I finally do it? Yes. I gather up the courage and push what I believe to be the start button. There is a whirring noise then nothing, for an excruciating second I think I have made a…
1425
The Next Mission
Slides for the brief talk that I gave at a Harvard seminar on privacy and user data organized by John Taysom last week.
1426
1427
A nation of slaves
Back to: April Fools Day is Cancelled this Year. | Forward to: Yet another bad idea
1428
Subtly Bad Things Linux May Be Doing To PostgreSQL
In addition to talking about PostgreSQL at LSF/MM and Collab , I also learned a few things about the Linux kernel that I had not known befor...
1429
0^0
Clever student: I know! $latex x^{0}$ = $latex x^{1-1}$ = $latex x^{1} x^{-1}$ = $latex \frac{x}{x}$ = $latex 1$. Now we just plug in x=0, and we see that zero to the zero is one! Cleverer …
1430
How to get beyond the parasite economy
It is time to get parasitic structured finance out of our economy - and we should start with the musical instrument industry.
1431
1432
My Surreal UberX Experience
A VC's perspective on how modern tech platforms like Uber break down communication barriers and enable seamless interactions - even between hearing and deaf users.
1433
Crowdfunding the Novena Open Laptop
We’re launching a crowdfunding campaign around our Novena open hardware computing platform. Originally, this started as a hobby project to build a computer just for me and xobs – something that we would use every day, easy to extend and to mod, our very own Swiss Army knife. I’ve posted here a couple of times about…
1434
Tarsnap price cut
This will no doubt annoy my friends Patrick McKenzie and Thomas Ptacek , who for years have been telling me that I should raise Tarsnap's prices. But while Thomas accuses me of running Tarsnap like a public utility rather than a business, and thinks this is a characteristic to be avoided, I see this as a high…
1435
1436
409A as a Service: Cash Cows Get Slaughtered
Background: 409A is a set of tax rules passed, in part, to stop companies from avoiding taxes through issuing underpriced (cheap) equity as compensation. While well-intentioned, it spawned a cottage industry of third-party valuation firms/i-bankers who charge companies, including startups, thousands (sometimes…
1437
Why Don’t We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor?
We have excellent tools to create and edit text (vim, emacs, sublime, etc.). We have pretty good tools to create and edit tabular data (excel, other spreadsheet software). We even have pretty good …
1438
Why xkcd-style graphs are important
For most data scientists, a toolkit like scipy/matplotlib or R becomes so familiar that it becomes almost an extension of their own mind. When fleshing out an idea, we will just open up ipython, write a few lines of code, and display the plot on the screen to get …
1439
1440
The value of an engineering degree
Six years ago, in the summer of 2008, NYU and Polytechnic University came together to create NYU Poly, NYU’s engineering school in downtown Brooklyn. When I saw the news, I called NYU President John Sexton and asked for a meeting. He agreed and I went down to Washington Square to meet with him. I told […]