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Monorepo: please do
You should choose a monorepo because the default behavior it encourages in your teams is visibility and shared responsibility, especially…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,668 posts.
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One Year in San Francisco as a Software Engineer
In 2017 the company I worked for in Toronto got acquired by Yelp. The software engineers in my company (including myself) were asked to move to San Francisco. At the end of 2017 we moved, and I spent most of 2018 there. With the year coming to an end, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on my time there.
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Gaussian Processes Are Not So Fancy
Gaussian Processes have a mystique related to the dense probabilistic terminology that's already evident in their name. But Gaussian Processes are just models, and they're much more like k-nearest neighbors and linear regression than may at first be apparent.
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Measuring the size of the Earth by watching a shadow on a wall
Recently I've been discussing the details of measuring the size of the Earth by watching a shadow descending a wall at sunrise, or ascending at sunset. The sums are easy enough if you do it at either Equinox, and at the Equator, and you can read about it here:
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Using TLA+ to Understand Xen Vchan
The vchan protocol is used to stream data between virtual machines on a Xen host without needing any locks. It is largely undocumented. The TLA …
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Apple knows 5G is about infrastructure, not mobile phones (2018)
5G is overkill for phones but that's okay because for carriers it is really about destroying broadcast and cable TV, ISPs, and telephone companies. One network to rule them all.
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A sane introduction to maximum likelihood estimation and maximum a posteriori
It is frustrating to learn about principles such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), maximum a posteriori (MAP) and Bayesian inference in general. The main reason behind this difficulty, in my opinion, is that many tutorials assume previous knowledge, use implicit or inconsistent notation, or are even addressing a…
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Migrating from Google Analytics
In this post we'll explore what happened when I migrated away from Google Analytics (GA) to a self-hosted solution. The tool that I migrated to is an open-source platform called Countly . It offers a subset of features from what GA offers.
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Monorepos: Please don’t
Here we are at the beginning of 2019 and I’m engaged in yet another discussion on the merits (or lack thereof) of keeping all of an…
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Exploiting the Math.expm1 typing bug in V8
Minus zero behaves like zero, right?
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What Is Going to Happen in 2019
Hi Everyone. Happy 2019. Today, as is my custom on the first day of the new year, I am going to take a stab at what the year ahead will bring. I find it useful to think about what we are in for. It helps me invest and advise the companies we are invested in. […]
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A Visual Exploration of Gaussian Processes
Consulting software engineer and research scientist. I build visualization systems for complex data and machine learning models.
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The Worst Interface Ever: The Self-Destruct Switch (2004)
How do I know about this switch? I had one installed, at Lexus’s suggestion, but with my money, not knowing about the horrifying interface until it was too late and my $1500 was history. What did I do? What any combination human-computer interaction designer/licensed pilot would do: I went through the trouble of…
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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
Background : “IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning…
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Automatic categorization of text is a core tool now
Get ready for medium data
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Lessons from Running a Small-Scale Electronics Factory in My Guest Bedroom
After assembling over 200 Telephreak badges by hand for DEFCON 26 (and taking *way* longer to accomplish it than I estimated) I figured I should document some of the lessons that I learned along the way – from initial design to finished product. The subject of many of the examples of the right way to […]
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Programmer as wizard, programmer as engineer (2018)
Context matters. Sometimes we need to get things done, sometimes we need to build things to last.
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Zero-knowledge attestation
U2F/FIDO tokens (a.k.a. “Security Keys”) are a solid contender for doing something about the effectiveness of phishing and so I believe they're pretty important. I've written a fairly lengthy introduction to them previously and, as mentioned there, one concerning aspect of their design is that they permit attestation…
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Pathfinding for Tower Defense
In a Tower Defense game, there are many enemies that are all headed to the same place. In many Tower Defense games, there is a predetermined path, or a small number of paths. In some, such as the classic Desktop Tower Defense [1] , you can place towers anywhere, and they act as obstacles that affect the paths taken by…
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PANE: Programming with visible data
PANE is a live, functional programming environment built around data-visibility. In PANE, all intermediate values are visible by default, and you construct a program by acting on these concrete values.
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Learning KVM – implement your own kernel
Few weeks ago I solved a great KVM escaping challenge from TWCTF hosted by @TokyoWesterns . I have given a writeup on my blog: [Write-up] T...