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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,419 posts.
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So You Think You Have a Power Law (2007)
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…
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Maybe you don't need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS
Few weeks ago I noticed a blog post "Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly" making rounds on Twitter - talking about performance benefits of replacing plain JavaScript in the core of source-map library with a Rust version compiled to WebAssembly.
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Google's CardDAV server isn't standards compliant (2014)
For fruux , we’ve decided to implement syncing with Google Contacts some time ago, allowing people to do bi-directional sync between their fruux and Google Contacts address book.
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FlightSimLabs Alleged Malware Analysis
UPDATE: Two updates can be found at the bottom of this article revealing the findings from Fidus InfoSec and FSLabs’ response to the…
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Norris Numbers – Walls you hit in program size (2014)
My friend Clift Norris has identified a fundamental constant that I call Norris’ number, the average amount of code an untrained programmer can write before he or she hits a wall. Clift estimates this as 1,500 lines. Beyond that the code becomes so tangled that the author cannot debug or modify it without herculean…
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The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)
25 recent entries The horn of the Robert Smalls A difficulty in race-switching the Dukes of Hazzard On futile explanations Richard Blair Race-switching The Dukes of Hazzard Greek plural Erbaut Improved English-language month names I fix a thirty-year-old mistake Minced oaths? On the monobosom Partly about pie More…
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Asciinema 2.0
News about asciinema development and new releases
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Michael Lewis and the parable of the lucky man taking the extra cookie (2017)
In 2012, Michael Lewis gave a commencement speech at Princeton University, his alma mater. In the speech, Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and The
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I.MX7 M4 Atomic Cache Bug
Hardware Bugs can be frustrating, as they are likely the last place you would expect a bug. Unfortunately, they can and do happen. Most likely every CPU has a list of erratas. This post outlines th…
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Introduction to Apple WatchKit with Core Motion – Tracking Jumping Jacks
Like many developers exploring the world of wearables, I’m an avid fan of apps that track your exercise. Companies like Strava & Runkeeper have paved the way for what we can do with motion and health data, creating new and… Continue reading Introduction to Apple WatchKit with Core Motion — Tracking Jumping Jacks
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What Made Lisp Different (2002)
(This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds .) When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most important of which was Fortran . Lisp embodied nine new ideas:
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The Evil Within the Comparison Functions
Perhaps, readers remember my article titled Last line effect. It describes a pattern I′ve once noticed: in most cases programmers make an error in the last line of similar text blocks. Now I want...
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Newly observed optical state could enable quantum computing with photons
MIT and Harvard physicists have created a new form of light that could enable quantum computing with photons.
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Just teach my kid the math
This is a new thing for me - I'm hosting a blog post by a colleague/friend - James Tanton. You can find James' original post here. One reason it's being re-hosted here is because Medium is apparently blocked in some countries: Egypt Malaysia ..... possibly others. It is astounding to me that mathematics - of all…
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How not to replace email: lessons from Google Wave
As of a month ago, the ApacheWave project is“retired”. Few people noticed; in the seven years that Wave was anApache Incubator open source project, it never ...
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Books I used to develop a game engine
If you have decided to develop your game engine, you may be wondering where to start, what books to start reading, etc. If you are in this situation, I recommend getting a copy of the following books:
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Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
Writing should be a pleasant experience. With the right tools, it can be. LaTeX is powerful but cumbersome to use. With Markdown, we can focus on our writing, and worry about the presentation later. Pandoc can take care of the presentation for us, so the only thing left to do is start.
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What is Debian all about, really? Or: friction, packaging complex applications
This weekend, those interested in Debian development have been having a discussion on the debian-devel mailing list about "What can Debian do to provide complex applications to its users?". I'm commenting on that in my blog rather than the mailing list, since this got a bit too long to be usefully done in an email.