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Cycling Lessons Learned from Amsterdam
Cycling Lessons Learned From Amsterdam That No One Talks About This post originally appears on Spacing Vancouver. By Darren Proulx and Samuel Baron I recently had the honour of visiting Amsterdam. …
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,426 posts.
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I Will File Bugs for You (2014)
This post prompted by Aaron Klotz’s Diffusion of Responsibility and Sumana Harihareswara’s Inessential Weirdnesses in Open Source .
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Who makes minimum wage?
Perhaps surprisingly, not very many people earn minimum wage, and they make up a smaller share of the workforce than they used to.
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Why OCaml GADTs matter for performance
When GADTs (Generalized Algebraic Data Types) landed in OCaml, I wasn’t particularly happy about it. I assumed that it was the kind of nonsense you get when ...
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Choose Boring Technology
Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become…
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The Invention of the Baby Carrot
Baby carrots are just regular carrots cut up and polished down. They're also the biggest thing to happen to carrots since orange. How did it happen?
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Why are interest rates so low?
Ben Bernanke says that low interest rates are not a short-term aberration, but part of a long-term trend and explains the rationale behind the Federal Reserve's continued policies.
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Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
In my February 23 blog post, I gave a brief overview of how search engines have evolved over the years and how today’s search engines learn from past searches to anticipate which results will be mo…
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I Just Poured Water on my Scanner
Chip that come into the museum are all scanned on a Canon 5600F flatbed scanner. It has a good (there is some better though) depth of field, and its fast. Typically chips are scanned at 300dpi, or for small ones (or ones that have a die visible) 600dpi. This keep the file sizes reasonable, yet still allows them to be…
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Improving compression with a preset DEFLATE dictionary
A few years ago Google made a proposal for a new HTTP compression method, called SDCH (SanDwiCH). The idea behind the method is to create a dictionary of long strings that appear throughout many pages of the same domain (or popular search results).
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An API is only as good as its documentation
Your APIs are only as good as the documentation that comes with them. Invest time in getting docs right. — @rubenv on Twitter
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I’ve Joined the White House’s U.S. Digital Service
The need for effective government services is rising, while confidence in our ability to deliver them is dropping. More than ever, day-to-day interactions with government are powered by digital sys…
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Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video
A MOOC professor takes a contrarian view and creates a MOOC without relying on videos, and makeing the claim that they are not necessary for a meaningful online learning experience.
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IBM Watson Acquires Technology from Blekko
Experience an integrated media property for tech workers—latest news, explainers and market insights to help stay ahead of the curve.
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Inventing Favicon.ico
In 1998, I was a junior Program Manager on the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. My first project was shipping Internet Explorer 4 Plus, a CD-ROM with Internet Explorer 4.0 and a whole lot of tr…
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Exploding Software-Engineering Myths (2009)
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research At Microsoft Research, there are computer scientists and mathematicians who live in a world of theory and abstractions. Then there is Nachi Nagappan, who was on loan to the Windows development group for a year while building a triage system for software bugs. For Nagappan, a…
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By 2029 no computer or “machine intelligence” will have passed the Turing Test
will go to The Electronic Frontier Foundation if Kapor wins, or The Kurzweil Foundation if Kurzweil wins.
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My favorite bug: segfaults in Java
Update: Two years later, I wrote a more detailed version of this article: My favorite bug: segfaults in Java (redux) .
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How a bad RJ45 termination can ruin a cable
There are at least two good ways to make a bad Ethernet cable. One can start with badly-made bulk cable -- this seems to be the usual explanation for Chinese-made Ethernet cables -- or one can take good cable and do a terrible job of putting connectors on it. Some types of connectors -- a crimp BNC, for example -- are…
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Parents with annual family incomes below $125,000 will pay no tuition
News, research, and insights from Stanford University.
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Notes from Facebook's Developer Infrastructure at Scale F8 Talk
Any time Facebook talks about technical matters I tend to listen. They have a track record of demonstrating engineering leadership in several spaces. And, unlike many companies that just talk, Facebook often gives others access to those ideas via source code and healthy open source projects. It's rare to see a company…
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GNU make insanity: finding the value of the -j parameter
The other day at work a colleague posed the seemingly innocent question "Can I find out the value of the GNU make -j parameter inside a Ma...
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Book Review: Red Plenty
I. I decided to read Red Plenty because my biggest gripe after reading Singer’s book on Marx was that Marx refused to plan how communism would actually work, instead preferring to leave the e…
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Not everything is an expression
“ Everything is an expression ” is an informal slogan of several programming languages, particularly those descended from the Lisp family. It is meant to contrast with languages that distinguish statements from expressions , such as Python, JavaScript, and C.