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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,414 posts.
1802
Image Kernels explained visually
An image kernel is a small matrix used to apply effects like the ones you might find in Photoshop or Gimp, such as blurring, sharpening, outlining or embossing. They're also used in machine learning for 'feature extraction', a technique for determining the most important portions of an image. In this context the…
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Version 11 of Mathematica
Mathematica and the Wolfram Language: Version 11 released Aug 8, 2016. 3D printing, machine learning & neural networks, audio. Available for desktop, cloud.
1804
Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
In 2013, when it became clear, primarily through Edward Snowden’s heroic actions, that the level of snooping by the US and other governments was far greater than any of us would have thought, I moved all of my data out of the US and of course blogged about it (that blog post has been read almost 70000 times; I think…
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EU expands copyright to furniture and extends term by a century
The UK has just changed its copyright-and-patent monopoly law to extend copyright to furniture and to extend the term of that copyright on furniture with
1807
Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013)
I’ve been thinking about the lessons distributed systems engineers learn on the job. A great deal of our instruction is through scars made by mistakes made in production traffic. These scars are useful reminders, sure, but it’d be better to have more engineers with the full count of their fingers.
1808
Why do CPUs have multiple cache levels?
This is a reader question from “jlforrest” that seems worth answering in more detail than just a single sentence: I understand the need for a cache but I don’t understand why there are …
1809
TLS Everywhere, not https: URIs (2015)
A few years after HTTP appeared, around when W3C was founded in 1994, it was clear that an unencrypted and unauthenticated connection was too much of a liability for a lot of serious stuff, such as e-commerce, which everyone wanted to do on the web. (In those days, mass Deep Packet Inspection was not technically…
1810
How to Become a Data Scientist, Part 2
This is Part Two in a three-part series examining how to become a data scientist. Supported by extensive research and expert opinions, it aims to provide a comprehensive guide to anyone looking to move into this field, irrespective of background and experience. The topic of Part Two is: "Learning".
1811
How my open source hobby project became my job: 10 years of OptaPlanner
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The meeting that showed me the truth about VCs
I had a meeting with a well-known startup investor yesterday. The talk somehow pivoted from my seed-seeking startup into talking about the…
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How to become a data scientist
This is Part One in a three-part series examining how to become a data scientist. Supported by extensive research and expert opinions, it aims to provide a comprehensive guide to anyone looking to move into this field, irrespective of background and experience. The topic of Part One is: "What is Data Science?".
1815
Frequent Password Changes Is a Bad Security Idea
I’ve been saying for years that it’s bad security advice, that it encourages poor passwords. Lorrie Cranor, now the FTC’s chief technologist, agrees: By studying the data, the researchers identified common techniques account holders used when they were required to change passwords. A password like “tarheels#1”, for…
1816
The 39th Root of 92
My new office space suffers from a shortage of photons, so I’ve been wiring up light fixtures. As I was snaking 14-gauge cable through the ceiling cavity, I began to wonder: Why is it called 14-gauge? I know that the gauge specifies the size of the copper conductors, but how exactly? The number can’t be a simple…
1817
A x64 OS #1: UEFI
I briefly cover what it takes to start writing a kernel which bootstraps in UEFI, as opposed to BIOS.
1818
The LHC “nightmare scenario” has come true
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
1819
PlayStation Vita Exploit Reverse Engineering Challenge
We released HENkaku a week ago and were blown away by the reception. There has been over 25k unique installs and every day new homebrew are being announced. This is all thanks to those who contributed to the SDK project back when Rejuvenate was announced. Without a working toolchain for developers and a couple of…
1820
Throughput vs. Latency and Lock-Free vs. Wait-Free
On the previous post we showed an excellent presentation by Cliff Click, and one of the things he mentions is that there is performance for ...
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Notes on concurrency bugs
Do concurrency bugs matter? From the literature, we know that most reported bugs in distributed systems have really simple causes and can be caught by trivial tests, even when we only look at bugs that cause really bad failures, like loss of a cluster or data corruption. The filesystem literature echos this result …
1824
Mozilla Awards $585k to Nine Open Source Projects
“People use Tails to chat off-the-record, browse the web anonymously, and share sensitive documents. Many human rights defenders depend on Tails to do th
1825
Find a new city
There’s a very rom antic American story that I love, that lots of a rtists who are young and starting out love, too, and it goes like this: Move to the Big City with nothing, make friends, make art, struggle, but make it. That’s the kind of story told in Patti Smith’s wonderful memoir, Just Kids .
1826
Understanding gradient descent
Gradient descent is a standard tool for optimizing complex functions iteratively within a computer program. Its goal is: given some arbitrary function, find a minumum. For some small subset of functions - those that are convex - there's just a single minumum which also happens to be global. For most realistic…
1827
Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it
Migrating from GitHub to GitLab and setting up your own GitLab instance
1828
The truth about Lisp (2006)
In which the truth about lisp is revealed, and some alternatives are enumerated.
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How to listen when you disagree
Urban Confessional: A Free Listening Movement have been Free Listening on street corners for almost a decade. How to Listen When You Disagree is a reflection on listening from the 2016 RNC, and it is more relevant today than ever before.