The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,307 posts.
When John Titor first showed up on IRC chat in October of 2000, he was enjoying a neat kind of double billing - as his 38-year-old self sat downstairs in the kitchen, typing away, a two-year-old version of himself lay sound asleep upstairs in bed. The elder Titor had been sent back in time by the U.S. Army, which…
The Christian doctrine of trinitarianism states that there is one God that is manifest in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who together form the Holy Trinity. The doctrine…
On both sides of Atlantic the debate around strong cryptography frequently resurfaces. Proponents of weakening cryptography or introduction of backdoors (or "golden keys") cite national security. Technologists and activists oppose such proposals, citing freedoms and cybersecurity. Regulating cryptography is of course…
Below is the first draft list of papers I plan to discuss in my distributed systems seminar in the Spring semester. If you have some suggest...
A space efficient UTF-8 binary-to-text encoding
Today, on the 59th anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik satellite, the 6th generation XPS 13 developer edition makes its debut in both the US, Canada and Europe. This Kaby Lake-based system co…
AMP is Google's attempt to re-fight the transcoding wars of the early 2000s. It is actively dangerous to the web ecosystem, helps disseminate propaganda, and is disliked by many users. If, like me, you made the mistake of trying out AMP on your website - you're in a tricky position if you try to remove it. Google…
Numerical Optimization is one of the central techniques in Machine Learning. For many problems it is hard to figure out the best solution directly, but it is relatively easy to set up a loss function that measures how good a solution is - and then minimize the parameters of that function to find the solution.
A million hot takes have been posted about how the late-2016 MacBook Pro with USB-C is the undeniable proof that Apple doesn’t care about…
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…
Trying to find my place in the place I love, and constantly failing
As part of my OCaml Labs research project, I implemented a new macro system for OCaml, based on a design by Leo White and Jeremy Yallop [1] .
I explained here how money moves around the banking system and how the Bitcoin system causes us to revisit our assumptions about what a payment system must look like. In this post, I turn my attent…
This visualization shows the top 29 books ranked by the number of unique users linking to corresponding Amazon pages in Hacker News comments from Oct 2006 to Oct 2015.
Shenzhen I/O is a brilliant game. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a game about programming micro-controllers. It distills programming down to the fun parts, removing the inertia, …
This is what the inside of the cage looks like. Nearly all of the machines in the cage are Sun Ultra 2s. Attached to nearly all of these boxes are dual sets of MTI JBODs ("Just a Box Of Disks") (either 2500s or 8300s). The newer JBODs (the 8300) make up the majority of the storage arrays in the cage. Nearly all of the…
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A document from 1947 points towards an interesting Los Alamos policy: banning all spheres, innocuous or not, from technical areas.
its computational convenience • connections to the Gaussian distribution • differentiability and basis independence • why not squared error • absolute-error methods
October 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. ) How do you get good ideas for startups ? That's probably the number one question people ask me. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups? That might seem a stupid thing to ask…
This is a rant about smartcards with some digression into ranting about the integrated circuit industry.
Over the past few years we’ve heard more about smartphone encryption than, quite frankly, most of us expected to hear in a lifetime. We learned that proper encryption can slow down even sophi…
