The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,668 posts.
Better visual explanations of information theoretic quantities like entropy and mutual information using I-diagrams. Based on Raymond W. Yeung's "A new outlook on Shannon's information measures" paper from 1991.
Realtime rendering and videogame programming mostly, but I love computer science and visuals in all their forms. This is a notepad of my ideas.
telegra.ph/private-internet-access-vpn-acquired-by-malware-business-founded-by-former-israeli-spies-12-0120191,004 points359 commentsSecurity & Privacy details
arccompute.com/blog The following article contains quotes and links meant to inform VPN consumers concerning the ownership, affiliations, and past business practices of Kape Technologies (formerly known as Crossrider) in light of their acquisition of Private Internet Access VPN. I'd like to start by giving credit…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2019105 points18 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Today we’re going to talk about what a pre-modern battlefield might look like after the battle is over. Obvious content warning, since this post is going to talk about (and show pictures of) …
Note An important acknowledgement for a different view of doing science: open, collaborative, and more than a proof of concept. A few days ago, Loïc Estève, Alexandre Gramfort, Olivier Grisel,...
A year ago today I self-published “A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics” (PIM). In this short note I want to describe the success it’s had, summarize the complaints of some readers and the praise of others, and outline what’s next. Since publication PIM has sold over 11,000 copies. A rough chart showing the…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Radar is one of the most versitile sensors we have to determine what is happening in an environment. Some common applications include air traffic control, weather prediction, automated driver assist, astronomy and terrain mapping. Given that these applications have wildy varying requirements on resolution, range and…
Why startups can build valuable businesses by unbundling AWS: focused developer tools, better user experiences, and software that does one thing well.
The game Airmash was announced on Dec 10 2017 on Hacker News by a user named fivesigma. The game became very succesful in the year to come. But it would have a very rocky history.
We say Lox is a “high-level” language because it frees programmers from worrying about details irrelevant to the problem they’re solving. The user becomes an executive, giving the machine abstract goals and letting the lowly computer figure out how to get there.
How to be effective in the theatre of work
I’ve been watching a buttload of 40s movies over the past few months, and I was thinking about watching something really modern next. And then it occurred to me: How about if I watch all R…
Jacob Collier is the internet’s favorite musical virtuoso. Here’s his mostly acapella arrangement of a Christmas carol called “In The Bleak Midwinter.” The most remarkable p…
Three months ago, I quit my job at Google to start my own company. This past week, I decided that I wanted to get a feel for how much it…
TL;DR: If the cloud didn’t eat Hadoop Inc., Pivotal and Red Hat, what explains their diminished prospects? Marc Andresseesssen’s “software is eating the world” has given rise to an entire technolog…
Most code editors color different pieces of your program in different ways. For instance, they’ll make keywords like if bold and bright so that you notice when you’ve misspelled them. They’ll make non-executable parts like comments and documentation fainter so that you know that the computer isn’t seeing that part of…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2019404 points166 commentscited by 6History & Retro Computing details
(Note: Thanks to the effort of a kind reader, this post is now available in audio format! The playlist for the entire series may be found here.) This is the first part of a six-part (II, III, IV, V…
That’s an easy go: energy is the amount of (on) my electricity bill, or maybe of (on) my natural gas bill. If I am very concentrated, I might add that it is also the money I spend at the gasoline pump, and if I am even more concentrated I will suggest that it might have something to do with the filling up of my…
My friend Aviv was recently the subject of a popular Buzzfeed article about the possibility of an impending “information apocalypse”. tl;dr: Aviv extrapolates from the fake news crisis that started in 2016 to a world in which anyone can create AI-assisted misinformation campaigns indistinguishable from reality to the…
I’ve always been frustrated that people often talk about culture without giving actionable or realistic advice, and was previously prompted by this tweet to write about what I did when put in charge of a broken team:
TLA+ model checking made symbolic Konnov et al., OOPSLA’19 TLA+ is a formal specification language (Temporal Logic of Actions) particularly well suited to reasoning about distributed algorith…
Summary: jq rocks for speedy JSON mangling. Use it to make powerful git clean filters, e.g. when stripping out unwanted cached-data from Jupyter notebooks. You can find the documentation of git 'clean' and 'smudge' filters buried in the page on git-attributes , or see my example setup below.
I. Kaj Sotala has an outstanding review of Unlocking The Emotional Brain; I read the book, and Kaj’s review is better. He begins: UtEB’s premise is that much if not most of our behavior is dr…
focusing after dark • corn cob bulbs • before + after photos • saving ½–2h/day • my setup • why don’t more people do this?! • FAQs
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