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FreeBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad
Compatibility of FreeBSD on a Lenovo Thinkpad T480, notes and fixes (HiDPI, Trackpad, camera, etc).
Tree traversal without recursion: the tree as a state machine (2007)
I am currently working my way through Higher-Order Perl , a highly recommended tome on effective and practical use of functional programming techniques in Perl. As you’d expect from a book that spends a lot of time discussing such concepts as function composition and recursion, the subject of tree traversal makes a…
Good Code Design from Linux
Learn how Linux/FFmpeg C partial codebase is organized to be extensible and act as if it were meant to have “polymorphism”. Specifically, we’re going to briefly explore how Linux …
An introduction to deterministic builds with C/C++
What are deterministic builds?
Arabic and Islamic Themes in Frank Herbert's “Dune” (2004-2017)
Those who are familiar with Frank Herbert's famous novel Dune will notice his analogy for the spice, and the surrounding struggle for it, with the crude oil of the Middle East. The novel is symbolic about the dependence of the West on the oil, and the power struggles to control this valuable resource.
The more you learn, the faster you can learn
Throughout my schooling and career, I’ve impressed people over and over again with how quickly I pick up things, especially hard things. For instance, exactly 4y ago I did my first ever interview, got
Anatomy of a High-Performance Convolution
It's no surprise that modern deep-learning libraries have production-level, highly-optimized implementations of most operations. But just what is the black magic that these libraries use that we mere mortals don't? What exactly does one do to "optimize" or accelerate neural networks operations?
Escher-Like Spiral Tilings
The artist M.C. Escher drew many lovely tilings, which he called “regular divisions of the plane”. He worked hard to ensure that his tilings were of lifelike animal forms such as birds and fish. He filled notebooks with hand-drawn sketches of tilings, many of which later found their way into his woodcuts. If you’d…
The “mail is hard” myth
TL;DR: - Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it - Big Mailer Corps are quite happy with that myth, it keeps their userbase growing - Big Mailer Corps control a large percentage of the e-mail address space which is good for none of us - It's ok that people have…
Beginner's Guide to Linkers (2010)
This article is intended to help C & C++ programmers understand the essentials of what the linker does. I've explained this to a number of colleagues over the years, so I decided it was time to write it down so that it's more widely available (and so that I don't have to explain it again). [Updated March 2009 to…
Amazon’s “two-pizza teams”: The ultimate divisional organization (2013)
Amazon’s “two-pizza teams” are well-known; they’ve been written about in Fast Company and the WSJ. But almost everyone misses the point. They aren’t about team size—they’re about autonomy and accountability.
A Manager’s Guide to Kubernetes Adoption
Discussion on Hacker News This article and its topic were the subject of fairly detailed discussion on this thread here on Hacker News. Perusing through the comments should be well worth your time,…
Hiring Is Broken?
I can’t keep track of the number of articles I’ve read about hiring in the past few years. Inevitably, they all follow the exact same format. First, they claim that hiring is broken. Ne…
The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most European Nations
The US is so economically exceptional that the poorest 20 percent of Americans are richer than many of the world’s most affluent nations.
On-Device, Real-Time Hand Tracking with MediaPipe
Posted by Valentin Bazarevsky and Fan Zhang, Research Engineers, Google Research The ability to perceive the shape and motion of hands can be a v...
The physical Apple Card is a case of form over function
Apple Card is not just the physical card you get in the mail when you sign up for an Apple Card. There are a lot of upsides to what Apple's doing with Apple Card and Apple Pay. I get it. And I also believe the physical titanium Apple Card is a marvel of engineering. Kudos to the metallurgists and designers who…