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Hidden Costs That Engineers Ignore
“It’ll only take me a few hours to implement the feature,” we sometimes say. But after finishing, we find that every few weeks, we’re either fixing a bug with the feature, explaining it to another eng
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,400 posts.
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What Do We Want, Really?
I was in Amish country last week. Several times a day I heard the clip-clop of horse hooves and the whirring of buggy wheels coming down the street and then receding into the distance–a rathe…
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The two cultures of mathematics and biology
I’m a (50%) professor of mathematics and (50%) professor of molecular & cell biology at UC Berkeley. There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with biologists and…
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What Happened in 2014?
I’m not much for the rear view mirror. I like to look forward, not back. I guess that’s why I’m in the line of work I’m in. But I’m going to force myself to look back at 2014 and explain what just happened. Doing that will help me look forward (tomorrow?) and explain what is […]
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The CPAN Pull Request Challenge
If you join the CPAN pull request challenge, then at the start of each month in 2015 you'll be emailed a (somewhat) randomly selected CPAN distribution. You'll have one month to submit at least one pull request. You don't have to be an experienced Perl programmer, CPAN author, or githubber. The goal is to help others…
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New Solar Power Material Converts 90 Percent of Captured Light into Heat
A multidisciplinary engineering team at the University of California, San Diego developed a new nanoparticle-based material for concentrating solar power plants designed to absorb and convert to heat more than 90 percent of the sunlight it captures. The new material can also withstand temperatures greater than 700…
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The Man Who Invented Scotch Tape
How a scrappy "misfit" engineer with no college education revolutionized the world of tape.
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Why Deleting Sensitive Information from GitHub Doesn't Save You
Security and Programming Blog
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My Amazon S3 Mistake
DevFactor | Page are used for templating and causing DevFactor to be easily navigable
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How we made editing Wikipedia twice as fast
Over the past six months we deployed a new technology that sped up Wikipedia’s backend application, reducing the median page-saving time for editors from about 7.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds.
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How to Learn Efficiently
I am convinced that much of the gap between the best college students and the worst is explained by study habits. Frankly, most students study poorly. To make matters worse, most teachers are incapable of teaching good study habits. Learning is proportional with effort Sitting in a classroom listening to a professor…
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Generation JavaScript
I’ll start by saying that this is not a rant, but rather a cry of despair that I’m repeating and that slowly - but steadily - seems to come to consciousness in our industry, like this one. The phenomenon I’m about to describe is not only limited to the Javascript community either, that community seems a lot more…
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Saving a Project and a Company
I often get the question what it is exactly that I do for a living and usually I can’t really talk about it due to non-disclosure agreements and possible fall-out but in this case I got permission to do a write-up of my most recent job.
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The Death of Cocoa
For many of us, the simplicity, elegance, and performance of Apple’s hardware and software working together are the reason why we build on their platforms. And yet, after just a few months of working with Swift, Cocoa has begun to lose its luster.
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On the new Snowden documents
If you don’t follow NSA news obsessively, you might have missed yesterday’s massive Snowden document dump from Der Spiegel. The documents provide a great deal of insight into how the NSA brea…
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How Paul Graham Is Wrong
I love Paul Graham’s essays and his latest is no exception: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In. I agree that the US deserves dramatically better immigration policies, but in the meantime I’m…
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Quake on an oscilloscope
A summary of some problems I faced when tinkering with Quake to get it play nicely on an oscilloscope.
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A Gentle Introduction to Data Compression
Joe Bertolami's portfolio and blog covering artificial intelligence, game development, computer graphics, data compression, and more.
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It’s Not Too Late for Uber to Avoid Stupid Patent of the Month
“Good Spirit,” he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol As our devoted readers are aware, each month we highlight a...
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Software engineers should write
In elementary school, there were “math kids” and there were “English kids”. You were classified by the other kids’ impression of your prowess in each subject.
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The best things and stuff of 2014
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2014. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.