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The exponential function is a miracle
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,838 posts.
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Building a license plate reader from scratch with deep learning
Learn about attention mechanisms and how they are applied for text recognition tasks. We will also use tensorflow attention ocr to train our own number plate reader.
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WebGPU and WSL in Safari
WebGPU is a new API being developed by Apple and others in the W3C which enables high-performance 3D graphics and data-parallel computation on the Web.
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A Million Digits of Pi in 9 Lines of JavaScript
"Big integers" have landed in Javascript, at least in Firefox and Chrome. One of my favorite things to do with high precision arithmetic is to calculate digits of π. From scratch, that is, using only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
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Efficient string copying and concatenation in C
Martin Sebor looks at C string handling functions used to copy and concatenate strings and examines ways to improve their efficiency.
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Dark Mode for Slack
Slack is where work flows. It's where the people you need, the information you share, and the tools you use come together to get things done.
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A lighter V8
The V8 Lite project dramatically reduced the memory overhead of V8 on typical websites, this is how we did it.
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Two Browsers Walked into a Scrollbar
Read this page on the Filament Group website
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The Rise of the Electric Scooter
In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it’s not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much, right? On an electric
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What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
I replayed Warcraft III recently and was looking for other games I could play in the same genre. Turns out that outside of StarCraft 2, there are no recent games that are anywhere near as good. Wha…
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Dungeon crawling or lucid dreaming?
I’ve done several experiments with a text-generating neural network called GPT-2. Trained at great expense by OpenAI (to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars worth of computing power), GPT-2 learned to imitate all kinds of text from the internet. I’ve interacted with the basic model, discovering its abilities to…
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Non-Glamorous Gains: The Pennsylvania Land Tax Experiment
Since 1913, Pennsylvania has allowed cities to tax land at a higher rate than buildings. This decision has led to some unique success stories: cities that have weathered post-industrial decline and revitalized their urban cores.
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Dissatisfied with Docker
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
These candidates were assessed on a variety of axes, most importantly Community Participation Guideline enforcement and accessibility, but also including team requirements from engineering, organizational-values alignment, usability, utility and cost. To close out, I’ll talk about the options we haven’t chosen and…
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SSL added and removed here ;-)
This post is part of our ongoing series about networks, privacy, governments and (of course) online security tools like Cloak. Last week, the Washington Post unleashed yet another bombshell revelation from the Snowden documents.
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Compensation in 2019 – new grad tech offers
Analyzing compensation packages from 2019 new-graduate technology job offers.
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NY Payroll Company Vanishes with $35M
MyPayrollHR , a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people…
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I revoked $1M worth of EV certificates
Personal like or dislike of EV aside for a moment, we can all agree on what the name of EV certs implies. Organisations get their company details in the certificate and CAs have to do some extended validation of that data compared to a normal certificate. Turns out, that doesn'
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Harvesting LinkedIn data for fun and profit
A few years ago, before the GDPR era, I was involved in a stealth marketing startup. We went out of
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The speed reading fallacy: the case for slow reading
Speed reading promises to help anyone read at speeds of above 1000 words per minute. Sounds fantastic. The problem? It’s completely bogus.
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The iPhone and Apple's Services Strategy
Apple’s annual iPhone event may have marked Apple’s true shift into being a Services company
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Turn off DoH, Firefox
Affordable VM hosting in Glarus, Switzerland, operated by 100% hydropower. Devuan, debian, freebsd, ubuntu, centos. Our tech stack is fully open source.
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Caniuse and MDN compatibility data collaboration
Today we’re announcing the integration of MDN’s compat data into the caniuse website. Together, we’re bringing even more web compatibility information into the hands of web developers.
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Natural Language in Python Using SpaCy: An Introduction
Deep dive into python spacy with code examples, real-world applications, and expert insights for data science practitioners.
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Xinjiang University President Tashpolat Tiyip Sentenced to Death in Secret Trial
Source: Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia (1/22/19) A Death Sentence For a Life of Service By Amy Anderson Note: This article written by Amy Anderson is based on interviews with Tashpolat Tiyip’s…
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Metronomes in JavaScript
Monica Dinculescu's blog