The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,470 posts.
Banks are scared. They’ve seen the rise of the new world of open APIs, apps and analytics and know that their organisations are not yet ready or fit to change to that world. What to do? Well, the easiest thing to do is to block access to the bank’s data. If third party FinTech firms...
Update: My erstwhile colleague Mathias wrote up his thoughts about his role in this story
Everyone thinks they’re hiring the top 1%. Martin Fowler: “We are still working hard to hire only the very top fraction of software developers (the target is around the top 0.5 to …
First impressions of a new place are often delusional. We usually focus on the good aspects of a foreign culture because everything is different and exciting. The blessing or curse of being an…
Implementing Principal Component Analysis from scratch in Python: scatter matrices, eigenvectors, variance explained, and comparison with scikit-learn PCA.
The article should help people to understand the benefits of React and Angular for making an educated decision to choose between Angular or React. It tells my story why I moved from Angular to React after using both libraries for years. It's not just another click-bait article, but an article with lots of experiences…
If we attentively look at IT industry at 2017, all of us will see “containers” and “Docker” as the top buzzwords ever. We started to package developed software in Docker containers in every field. …
I really like C++. It's not the right tool for every job, but it's what I reach for when I need to do any kind of systems programming. Unfortunately, C++ has often been cited as a "bad" language, and I feel like that reputation has worsened over time. Recent languages like Go and Rust have taken over a lot of mind…
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 spreadsh...
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
This article describes how you can build a simple LISP, based on the 1978 article <i>'A Micro Manual For LISP - Not The Whole Truth'</i> with Swift, taking advantage where possible of the features the language offers.
I am old enough to remember the gogo days of cable TV when entrepreneurs who wanted to launch a new cable channel would go, hat in hand and cap table in tow, to the big cable companies and beg to get distribution on their networks. When the Internet came along in the early 90s, we […]
Using the flame graph visualization to determine where file system or disk space is consumed, and answer where space has gone.
This project, the M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine, was on my to-do list for a long time. I finally managed to complete the project after working on it for several months in my free time. The machine uses an Arduino microcontroller, stepper motors, an RGB colour sensor and 3D-printed parts to sort several types of…
With fundamental technology change, we don't so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things.
When discussing the validity of the Axiom of Choice, the most common argument for not taking it as gospel is the Banach-Tarski paradox. Yet, this never particularly bothered me. The argument …
The TTY subsystem is central to the design of Linux, and UNIX in general. Unfortunately, its importance is often overlooked, and it is difficult to find good introductory articles about it. I believe that a basic understanding of TTYs in Linux is essential for the developer and the advanced user.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
I've been thinking and prototyping a native HTML editor for a while⁺ . (Native as opposed to a text editor that's customized to work with HTML) This is a rough transcript of a presentation I gave on the subject in 2016. This presentation is about HTML, but these ideas could be useful for other markup languages, data…
In the beginning, it was just me and the (plain) terminal. Then I started using Byobu, because it was company-standard at my first job. Later I installed tmux on my personal computer because it seemed more popular. And every time I work on a remote server, I use Screen. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
In this position, I know about a bunch of mines on all the remaining fronts, but I can't quite determine where they are. There are a few mines that might be in one of two positions (red or blue), a cluster of mines that might be in one of two arrangements (green), and a more complex situation in the top left which I…
I was enjoying some pizza the other day with some buddies that know a bit about my research and understand where I am coming from with regards to my own computing aesthetics. They understand that I have always pushed for the smallest code that I can get, and to simplify
smallpt is a global illumination renderer. It is 99 lines of C++, is open source, and renders the above scene using unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing (click for full size) .
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
With all the craziness in the world going on at the moment, founders and start-up enthusiasts are looking which place is worth moving to. Some people are suggesting to consider Berlin. Sadly, Berlin is located in Germany, which means that bureaucracy is a thing you need to familiarize with. Papers need to be filled…
