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Base-122 – A space efficient alternative to base-64
A space efficient UTF-8 binary-to-text encoding
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 21,842 posts.
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Interactive Numerical Optimization Tutorial
Numerical Optimization is one of the central techniques in Machine Learning. For many problems it is hard to figure out the best solution directly, but it is relatively easy to set up a loss function that measures how good a solution is - and then minimize the parameters of that function to find the solution.
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The New Haxe Target: HashLink in depth, part 1
Find out more about HashLink, the newest Haxe target, a virtual machine used to develop system/server/desktop applications.
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Typed, modular macros for OCaml
As part of my OCaml Labs research project, I implemented a new macro system for OCaml, based on a design by Leo White and Jeremy Yallop [1] .
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Lessons Learned from Shenzhen I/O
Shenzhen I/O is a brilliant game. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a game about programming micro-controllers. It distills programming down to the fun parts, removing the inertia, …
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“Your program is stupid. It doesn't work,” my wife told me (2010)
<img src="http://stevehanov.ca/blog/wheel1.png"/>
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Add-ons in 2017
A little more than a year ago we started talking about where add-ons were headed, and what the future would look like. It’s been busy, and we wanted to give ...
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Open Source .NET – 2 years later
A little over 2 years ago Microsoft announced that they were open sourcing large parts of the .NET framework and as Scott Hanselman said in his recent Connect keynote, the community has been contributing in a significant way:
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A Rebuttal for Python 3
Zed Shaw, of Learn Python the Hard Way fame, has now written The Case Against Python 3. I’m not involved with core Python development. The only skin I have in this game is that I like Python 3. It’s a good language. And one of the big factors I’ve seen slowing its adoption is that respected people in the Python commu
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Curl Security Audit
"the overall impression of the state of security and robustness of the cURL library was positive." I asked for, and we were granted a security audit of curl from the Mozilla Secure Open Source program a while ago. This was done by Mozilla getting a 3rd party company involved to do the job and footing … Continue…
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List of scientific papers found in OpenJDK source code
List of Scientific Papers found in Java source code
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Procedural Dungeon Generation: Cellular Automata
Last time we looked at generating random dungeons for video games using the Drunkard’s Walk algorithm. The Drunkard’s Walk is fun to play with, and often generates cool levels, but it’s also pretty unreliable. That’s not good enough for my purposes: I want to reliably generate big, open, cave-like maps, with lots of…
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How to speed up the Rust compiler some more
I recently wrote about some work I’ve done to speed up the Rust compiler . Since then I’ve done some more.
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The Case Against Python 3
This document serves as a collection of reasons why beginners should avoid Python 3 as of November 22nd, 2016. I give two sets of reasons as I see them now. One for total beginners, and another for people who are more knowledgeable about programming. The first section attempts to explain the case against starting with…
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Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument
In Effective Modern C++ , one of the explanations I have in Item 7 ("Distinguish between () and {} when creating objects") is this: If ...
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Sccache, Mozilla’s distributed compiler cache, now written in Rust
If this were a diary it would have a unicorn on the cover, because unicorns are awesome.
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Inspecting C's qsort Through Animation
The C standard library includes a qsort() function for sorting arbitrary buffers given a comparator function. The name comes from its original Unix implementation, “quicker sort,” a variation of the well-known quicksort algorithm. The C standard doesn’t specify an algorithm, except to say that it may be unstable (C99…
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$15 Production Kubernetes Cluster on DigitalOcean
As you might already know, I’m into containers , static configuration and self-service infrastructures . Naturally, I love Kubernetes , which I consider the most promising cluster scheduler around.
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Lua: A Guide for Redis Users
You’ve heard that Redis has an embedded scripting language, but haven’t given it a try yet? Here’s a tour of what you need to understand to use the power of Lua with your Redis server.
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Ruby 2.3.3 released
Ruby 2.3.3 has been released.
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New for AWS Lambda – Environment Variables and Serverless Application Model
I am thrilled by all of the excitement that I see around AWS Lambda and serverless application development. I have shared many serverless success stories, tools, and open source projects in the AWS Week in Review over the last year or two. Today I would like to tell you about two important additions to Lambda: […]
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Tutorial – Write a System Call
Stephen Brennan's personal website and blog.
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Reinforcement learning with unsupervised auxiliary tasks
Our primary mission at DeepMind is to push the boundaries of AI, developing programs that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be taught how. Our reinforcement learning agents have achieved breakthroughs in Atari 2600 games and the game of Go. Such systems, however, can require a lot of data and a…
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WebExtensions in Firefox 52
Firefox 52 landed in Developer Edition this week, so we have another update on WebExtensions for you. WebExtensions are becoming the standard for add-on development in Firefox. API Parity The ...