The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,567 posts.
Did you know there’s an algebraic structure for functions? That may not surprise you at all. But it surprised me when I first found out about it. I knew we used functions to build algebraic structures. It never occurred to me that functions themselves might have an algebraic structure. The structure is fascinating…
Gosper's Glider Gun in Conway's Game of Life I'd known of Conway since my early teens. I remember reading about his Game of Life in an old Scientific American someone gave me. The article (a quick search tells me) was published in October 1970, so I'm guessing I saw it in the early 70s, perhaps 1972. I was hooked.
Let's assume that there is a discussion going on on the Internet about programming languages. One of the design points that come up is a gar...
AKA Anycast-Pi-hole-as-a-Service... but even better!
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go: 1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
Programming language performance is something that nearly everyone cares about at some point, whether they realise it or not. If you’re a programmer, you sometimes have to make your programs run fast; if you’re a user, you might be frustrated at a program that runs slowly, without knowing that it’s caused by a poor…
Computers and computer systems are build up from deterministic, comprehensible, building blocks. Their operations and behaviors can be understood and reasoned about. I relate my personal beliefs and mindset on this point, and explore some manifestations and ramifications of this philosophy.
The rules of logic no longer apply when you cross the line.
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Making a game where your enemies need to chase the player? This starts out easy, make the enemy run towards the player! But what happen...
I can no longer sync iOS’ Contacts with my macOS Catalina’s Finder (the iOS sync portion of iTunes is now built into the Finder in macOS Catalina); the OS insists I’ve iCloud configured for Contact...
Apple and Google released a joint specification that allows both iPhones and Android devices to do contact tracing on a global scale. Even though "privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance", this is a game changing event that has grave consequences. We must stop Apple and Google in their tracks. Or…
Using Java or Python in a professional IDE like IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans, PyCharm, or Eclipse is not a good first introduction to programming for computer science students, whether they’re in the field to become web developers, systems software engineers, or academic computer science researchers.
In our previous installment of this podcast, we learned from independent researcher Alexey Guzey that famed sleep researcher Matthew Walker seems to have committed research misconduct in his bestselling book, Why We Sleep. Walker is a University of California professor, Google researcher, and Ted talk star, and his…
When most people think about pi, they associate the mathematical constant with arcs and circles. Mathematicians, however, are accustomed to seeing it in a variety of fields. But two University physicists were still surprised to find it lurking in a quantum mechanics formula for the energy states of the hydrogen atom.
tl;dr: I like PurelyMail and I will slowly switch all my online accounts to use it. I've been using it for almost three months and I didn't have any issues (except with some Hotmail/Outlook addresses). I have a GMail account since 2006 (that's the date
How do I synchronize application data between devices and people? That's the question I was unable to answer when thinking about ideas for new applications I could develop. I wanted the synchronization to be
For the past two years, the Boston Basic Income YouTube channel has been live streaming our weekly discussion group as we explore…
I have no illusions; I know that today’s post will upset quite a few people. Why, might you ask? Well, it’s because there has been a long standing myth -myth- in construction that the p…
Shopify's involvement with TruffleRuby began half a year ago, with the goal of furthering the success of the project and Ruby community. TruffleRuby is an alternative implementation of the Ruby language (where the reference implementation is CRuby, or MRI) developed by Oracle Labs. TruffleRuby has high potential in…
Let structure emerge organically. When it’s imposed from the start, you prematurely constrain what may emerge and artificially compress the nuanced relationships between ideas.
A comprehensive list of useful questions to ask the interviewer a the end of a technical interview.
