The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,763 posts.
Introduction / Warning Link to heading Any traditional introductory statistics course will teach students the definitions of modes, medians and means. But, because introductory courses can’t assume that students have much mathematical maturity, the close relationship between these three summary statistics can’t be…
Graphics is all about geometry. In particular, there are points that have a certain color, and the pattern of colors gives you a certain picture. You can change the way the points are distributed by applying certain transformations like translation (movement), rotation and scaling. While most people familiar with the…
Humans don’t start their thinking from scratch every second. As you read this essay, you understand each word based on your understanding of previous words. You don’t throw everything away and start thinking from scratch again. Your thoughts have persistence.
In the jungle of new programming languages, Crystal is one of the most popular ones, but also the most mysterious. Let's take a look at it.
Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Tim Ferriss, and most recently Sam Altman (but see his clarification) think there are too many opinions…
The consequence for minor lapses in judgment shouldn’t be death.
Update – the fake reviews featured below were removed shortly after this post blew up on Hacker News.
Four years ago, I broke my comment section by declaring that Elon Musk’s Hyperloop proposal had no merit, combining technical criticism with expressions like “barf ride” and ̶…
Did you know that Emacs comes with a calculator ? Woop-dee-doo! Call the presses! Wow, a whole calculator! Sounds a bit lame, right?
While teaching a web development class, I wanted to present some benchmarks that show the performance benefits of asm.js as well as WebAssembly. I was unfortunately not able to find a suitable reference. Therefore, I implemented a simplistic raytracer in JavaScript as well as in C++ with a similar code structure while…
Recently, while browsing Twitter, I saw a few machine learning researchers post about an incident at one of their big conferences (NIPS) in…
A journey through a trendy hell
As the U.S. Federal Communications Commission prepares to rollback net neutrality protections, the Canadian government has used the controversy to double down on its support for net neutrality safeguards, linking it to democracy, equality, and freedom of expression. I've written several posts on how the U.S. decision…
Once a month users post a chart on `r/ethereum` predicting the blockchain size of Ethereum will soon exceed 1 TB. I want to clean up with some stories around the Ethereum-blockchain size in this article and try to explain why this chart is technically correct, but not the full picture...
Ranking the cities and states and release the most toxins into the environment.
With people spending more time on social media, many rightly wonder whether that time is good for us. Do people connect in meaningful ways online? Or are they simply consuming trivial updates and polarizing memes at the expense of time with loved ones?
The Metal Gear series achieved world-wide recognition when Metal Gear Solid became a best-seller on the original PlayStation almost two …
Some people claim that unit tests make type systems unnecessary: "types are just simple unit tests written for you, and simple unit tests aren't the important ones". Other people claim that type systems make unit tests unnecessary: "dynamic languages only need unit tests because they don't have type systems." What's…
Today the Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality — a terrible step for the future of a free and open internet and for…
