271
ZedRipper: A 16-core Z80 laptop
Meet the ZedRipper – a 16-core, 83 MHz Z80 powerhouse as portable as it is impractical. The ZedRipper is my latest attempt to build a fun ‘project’ machine, with a couple of goals in mind:
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,838 posts.
272
Preventing Tracking Prevention Tracking
This blog post covers enhancements to Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) included in Safari on iOS and iPadOS 13.3, Safari 13.0.4 on macOS Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra.
273
274
Object-recognition dataset stumped the world’s best computer vision models
When computer vision detectors are turned loose in the real world, their performance noticeably drops. In an effort to close this performance gap, a team of MIT and IBM researchers set out to create a very different kind of object-recognition dataset called ObjectNet.
275
276
277
L-systems
Jordan Santell, focusing on open web engineering, immersive web, WebXR, WebGL, JavaScript, open source, open standards, and all things weird web.
278
Away Fires CEO Steph Korey After Months-Long Search for Her Replacement
So now the narrative is not “Away fires woman CEO and co-founder, replaces her with a man”. Instead, the narrative is “Away fires CEO who created ‘toxic culture’, brings in fresh leadership” — a narrative that wouldn’t be possible without The Verge’s story last Thursday.
279
280
Things end users care about but programmers don't
A list of things I've noticed are important for end users but hard for programmers to understand or implement
281
The Nintendo Switch Switch
Yesterday I had the idea that it would be cool if I turned a Nintendo Switch (will be referred to as NX to avoid confusion as NX is the code name for the Nintendo Switch ) console into an actual network switch. I thought about it a bit and realized that it would be doable in hardware at least, since the NX docking…
282
Technology Preview: Signal Private Group System
Groups are inherently social, and Signal is a social app. Whether you’re planning a surprise party, discussing last night’s book club meeting, exchanging photos with your family, or organizing something important, group messaging has always been a key feature of Signal. Signal provides private gr...
283
284
285
Formatting Is Unreasonably Expensive for Embedded Rust
As a (late) part of the #rust2020 request, I wanted to talk about one of the paper-cuts that has become decently problematic for new and experienced users of Embedded Rust: The size costs of formatting in Rust today are unreasonably expensive for users of Rust on bare metal embedded systems. In particular there are…
286
O(n^2), again, now in Windows Management Instrumentation
I recently hit some multi-minute delays on my workstation. After investigating I found that the problem was due to a lock being held for five minutes, and during that time the lock-holder was mostl…
287
Long Bets by Confidence Level
If you want to make a long-term bet one of your options is to register your bet with the Long Now Foundation as a Long Bet. They have some rules, which are roughly: Both parties put up the same amount, at least $200/each. Long Bets effectively runs a donor-advised fund (DAF). When the bet concludes the winner chooses…
288
Operations for Effective CEOs
Pulse is a platform for team alignment. Engineered to help modern teams stay more connected and aligned by communicating more openly and asynchronously.
289
290
Héctor Garcia-Molina, 1953–2019
We all lost a great person Cropped from Mexican NotiCyTI obit Héctor Garcia-Molina died just before Thanksgiving. He was a computer scientist and Professor in both the Departments of Computer Scien…
291
Developing a Statically Typed Programming Language (2017)
In this blog post we’ll go through a sample implementation of a type checker, interpreter and a transpiler for a basic purely functional programming language, which is based on the lambda calculus. We will do a “full-stack” programming language development by going through formal definition of the language’s syntax…
292
Why databases use ordered indexes but programming uses hash tables
I think it is safe to state that hash tables (e.g. maps in Go, dicts in Python, HashMap in Java, etc.) are far more common than ordered data structures such as trees for in-memory data structures. One data point is that in a talk about C++ hash table optimization at Google ( available in Abseil ), the speaker noted…
293
Larry and Sergey: A Valediction
Photographer: “How ’bout we do the shoot in a hot tub?” Larry and Sergey: “Sure!” Never such innocence again. Can billionaires be tragic figures? Lear must have been w…
294
Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
Well, as of sometime on December 5th a huge number of the archivists that were scrambling to rescue archives from Yahoo Groups, had their {e-mail addresses} apparently banned so they can no longer…
295
Using machine learning to choose compression algorithms
30% less disk required compared to using the single best strategy
296
297
An amusing story about a practical use of the null garbage collector
The computer itself ceases to exist.
298
Statically-typed error handling in Python using Mypy
mypy assisted error handling, exception mechanisms in other languages, fun with pattern matching and type variance
299
The Go runtime scheduler's way of dealing with system calls
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…
300
