The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
Writing should be a pleasant experience. With the right tools, it can be. LaTeX is powerful but cumbersome to use. With Markdown, we can focus on our writing, and worry about the presentation later. Pandoc can take care of the presentation for us, so the only thing left to do is start.
This weekend, those interested in Debian development have been having a discussion on the debian-devel mailing list about "What can Debian do to provide complex applications to its users?". I'm commenting on that in my blog rather than the mailing list, since this got a bit too long to be usefully done in an email.
It should not be difficult to love Amazon. To consumers, it offers choice and convenience. Countless internet ventures have relied on its cheap, flexible cloud computing services to start and scale…
This is a brief introduction into polynomials. From how to make a polynomial run through your set of points to how to make it into a spline.
Holy smokes: For the full Twitter experience on Mac, visit Twitter on web. ???? https://t.co/fuPJa3nVky — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 16, 2018 I’m glad Twitter got rid of all of the Nazis and Russian bots on their platform before this.
There has been some debate on Hacker News lately about what makes Lisp cool , in particular about whether the secret sauce is homo-iconici...
I have written several books that use Python to explain topics like Bayesian Statistics and Digital Signal Processing. Along with the books...
I was a contributor for OpenStreetMap for a long time, and I advocated for OpenStreetMap for a long time, but the project has stalled while the proprietary mapping world has continued to improve in data quality. For those of us who care about Free and Open data, this is a problem. In this article, I explore the…
I’ve been looking for a decent TSDB for years now. Took a shot at writing one in Lush using HDF5 (as others have done), but the experiments I did raised more questions than I got answers. I&#…
This essay describes a number of strategies for studying college level mathematics. It has sections entitled
Recently, I’ve seen popular articles on macros and metaprogramming in Nimrod and Elixir . Both of these are wonderful metaprogramming systems, to be sure, but I couldn’t help but imagine some in the audience smirking inwardly – and occasionally less inwardly. What odd syntax! How out-of-place they are! If only there…
Some futurists try to foresee the future. Others attempt to shape it. Yet prolific science-fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov did both. Asimov not
The Benjamin Franklin method for programming books: read a code sample, close the book, and rewrite it from memory to truly learn it.
Just as all mainstream languages now have lambda functions, I predict sum types are the next construct to spread outward from the typed functional programming community to the mainstream. Sum types are very useful, and after living with them in Haskell for a while, I miss them deeply when using languages without them…
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
So there’s yet another iOS text crash, where just looking at a particular string crashes iOS. Basically, if you put this string in any system text …
[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this a…
Open Source Freelancer
June 24, 2018 note: If you want to cite an example from the post, please cite the paper which that example came from. If you want to cite the post as a whole, you can use the following BibTeX:
A list of things that were not supposed to be Turing-complete, but are.
A blog about computing and other fun.
In late 2016 I began helping Forgotten Empires on Age 1 DE , a UWP app shipping in the Windows Store on Feb 20th. I only helped occasionall...
This form of Spectre can be used to attack a broad range of software -- operating systems, device drivers, web APIs, database systems, and almost anything else that receives untrusted input and may run on the same computer as untrusted code. Because large programs can contain literally millions of conditional branches…
At Recode’s Code Media conference on Feb. 13, 2018 (a few hours ago as I write this), they live streamed an interview with Ronny Abovitz, CEO of Magic Leap and NBA commissioner Adam Silver. The int…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
or: how you can deploy services to Kubernetes that require long periods of draining. #🌈 🌈 🌈 #If you want to jump directly to the technical solution, check out the project repo. Below is a short story about how we got to this solution.
