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Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,426 posts.
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Whatever happened to Channel 1?
On June 15, 1936, the FCC began informal hearings concerning the radio spectrum above 30 MHz. There was an increasing demand for those frequencies and a new word began to be heard at the FCC; that word was standards. The Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), the trade association for the radio and television…
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No Matter What the FBI Says, Compromising Encryption Is a Technical Issue
What does the FBI want when it comes to the encryption “debate”? At an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, FBI Director James Comey offered what he called the “good news” that it’s not a debate at all. In fact, he said, government and the tech industry all want the same...
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Google, D-Wave, and the case of the factor-10^8 speedup
Update (Dec. 16): If you’re still following this, please check out an important comment by Alex Selby, the discoverer of Selby’s algorithm, which I discussed in the post. Selby querie…
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The Content Marketing Handbook
A 30,000+ word blog post about how to write about information and make it spread. And something new from us: The Priceonomics Data Studio.
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The Cost and Complexity of Cgo
Cgo is an important part of Go: It's your window to calling anything that anything that has C bindings. But while cgo works for us, it hasn’t come for free.
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RethinkDB Driver for Java now available
Today, we’re pleased to announce the release of our Java client driver for RethinkDB. Visit the installation instructions for details about how to use it in your Java project.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Distributed Systems
For quite some time now I’ve been trying to learn about distributed systems, and it’s appropriate to say that once you start digging, there seems to be no end to it, the rabbit hole goes on and on. The literature in distributed systems is quite extensive, with lots of papers coming from different universities, plus…
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InfluxDB is now InfluxData, a platform for time series data
Today we're announcing that InfluxDB, the company, is now InfluxData. This is the beginning of delivering on our long-term vision.
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Cortana available on iOS and Android
Cortana was created to be a truly personal digital assistant – available on the go, no matter where or when you need help, and on whatever device you carry. That’s why it’s important to us that we bring Cortana to not only the Windows 10 ecosystem, but to other platforms. Today, we’re excited to announce
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Swift open source – let the revolution begin
It has only been a few days since the announcement of Swift going open source and the activity around the project has been incredible. When Apple revealed th...
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I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
Take a walk with Stephen Wolfram through the topics in his new book that introduces non-programmers to the Wolfram Language and computational thinking.
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Chemical flavorings found in e-cigarettes linked to lung disease
A Harvard study links chemicals used in flavored electronic cigarettes to cases of severe respiratory disease.
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We ditched Google Analytics
Space Cybersecurity has become a prominent topic in the news, particularly when it comes to protecting space-related assets and technologies.
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Focus by Firefox, a Content Blocker for iOS
Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of Focus by Firefox, a free content blocker for Safari users on iOS 9 that gives users greater control of their mobile Web ...
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Why Percentiles Don’t Work the Way We Think
Customers ask us for p99 (99th percentile) of metrics pretty frequently. We plan to add such a feature to Database Performance Monitor (DPM)(more on that later). But a lot of the time, when customers make this request, they have something very specific, and different, ...
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Choosing an HTTP Status Code
What could be simpler than returning HTTP status codes? Did the page render? Great, return 200. Does the page not exist? That’s a 404. Do I...
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After a ten-year hiatus, NetHack 3.6
Unlike previous releases, which focused on the general game fixes, this release consists of a series of foundational changes in the team, underlying infrastructure and changes to the approach to game development.
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Building a professional design tool on the web using C++ and Emscripten
Our vision for the future of design tools is one where both the tool and the content are easily available to anyone, anywhere. That’s why…
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Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
Modern work can be frustrating and chaotic—if you don’t have the right tools. From context engineering to multimodal search, go behind the scenes and hear how Dropbox engineers are building AI that actually understands you, so you can focus on the work that matters most.