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My application ran away and called home from Redmond
I recently found a surprising leak vector in Windows 10 installations. We were porting our Beacon to Windows and for easy deployment…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,838 posts.
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Preparing for 25 Years
On October 7, this blog will have existed and been continually updated for 25 years.
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New chips for machine intelligence
This note summarises details of some of the new silicon chips for machine intelligence. Its aim is to distil the most important implementation and architectural details (at least those that are currently available), to highlight the main differences between them. I’m focusing on chips designed for training since they…
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How to adopt an “openness” mindset at work
You can’t expect others to fix your problems. When you take responsibility for making the best of any situation, you have the power to make things better.
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An Inside Look at Microsoft’s Newest Flight Simulator
Fewer than 50 people outside the product team have actually flown the sim. I was lucky enough to be one of them.
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Building a constraint programming solver in Julia
How to build a constraint programming solver in Julia. Part 1: Solving Sudoku using backtracking
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A fast alternative to the modulo reduction (2016)
Suppose you want to pick an integer at random in a set of N elements. Your computer has functions to generate random 32-bit integers, how do you transform such numbers into indexes no larger than N? Suppose you have a hash table with a capacity N. Again, you need to transform your hash values (typically 32-bit ……
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The Founding of Google Maps (2015)
How four partners took an idea from a whiteboard to the browser
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Writing Is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence
Learning to write is learning to think, because writing is thinking. They are two peas in a powerful pod. This article goes over my writing process, focused on minimizing the activation energy to get started.
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How Bash Completion Works
Ever wondered how Bash completion works? In this first article on the topic, we’ll look at how it works under the hood.
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Learning Haskell is no harder than learning any other programming language
It has still often been difficult to find answers to my questions. I think this is largely due to the fact that when discussing things with the average Haskell programmer, I feel like I have a fourth-grade education.
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A Beginner’s Guide to Chart.js
In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to draw charts with Chart.js and how to customize them to suit our needs.
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CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
Follow up: Cloudflare: Making the internet a little bit faster – for a select group of people CloudFlare is a very helpful service if you are a website owner and don’t want to deal with separate…
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VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN
This research presents VPN⁰, the first distributed virtual private network offering a privacy preserving traffic authorization and validation mechanism.
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How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck? A Primer (2017)
Technology, startups, programming, technical management and software architecture
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E*Trade Announces $0 Base Commissions for Online Stock, ETF, and Options Trades
Stop waiting. Start investing. Lifelong dreams don't need to take a lifetime with E*TRADE.
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Avoid Working Alone
Dear new developer, I suggest that the first job you take be the one with the highest learning potential, not the highest earning potential. (This post contrasts the two, in the context of entrepre…
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Three Big Things: Important forces shaping the world
An irony of studying history is that we often know exactly how a story ends, but have no idea where…
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Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
A 2017 cartoon from this post. After the embargo update (Oct 25): Now that I have some answers from the people involved let me make a quick update: 1) I still find the paper unconvincing, specific…
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Deep Learning: Our Miraculous Year 1990-1991
Many of the basic ideas behind the Deep Learning Revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our "Annus Mirabilis" 1990-91
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Under-Investigated Fields
Nominations for fields that are not being researched as much as they should be
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Walkability a key factor determining upward mobility of a city's residents
Bipartisan Alliance, a Society for the Study of the US Constitution, and of Human Nature, where Republicans and Democrats meet.
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Principal Component Analysis
In the previous article in this series we distinguished between two kinds of unsupervised learning (cluster analysis and dimensionality reduction) and discussed the former in some detail. In this installment we turn our attention to the later. In dimensionality reduction we seek a function $f : \mathbb{R}^n \mapsto…