Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,497 posts.
A sparse matrix is a matrix that has a value of 0 for most elements. If the ratio of N umber of N on- Z ero ( NNZ ) elements to the size is less than 0.5, the matrix is sparse. While this is the mathematical definition, I will be using the term sparse for matrices with only NNZ elements and dense for matrices with all…
PostgreSQL always allowed, by default, any user to connect to any database, and create new tables (and views, and so on) in “public" schema. The one that is created by default.
Lagrange multipliers are used in multivariable calculus to find maxima and minima of a function subject to constraints (like "find the highest elevation along the given path" or "minimize the cost of materials for a box enclosing a given volume"). It's a useful technique, but all too often it is poorly taught and…
Around 2015, I started to realize that I was no longer part of Apple's target audience. I've since found that Windows, and the devices available on the Windows side, from gaming laptops to convertibles to custom-built PCs, are just a better match for my requirements.
I’m an occasional on-call operator for my battalion, assisting the on-call commander and staffing the control room from 16:00 in the afternoon until
An examination of the software that powers modern Climate simulations.
The European Commission just released their Proposal for a Regulation on a European approach for Artificial Intelligence . They finally get around to a definition of “AI” on page 60 of the report (link above):
Or subtitle: Maybe distributed programming is no longer a programming problem? (For the obvious impaired: This is meant to be more thought provoking than an actual truth) Over the last decade we ha…
[Content Warning: Trying to understand the contents of this essay may be mind-warping. Proceed with caution. Featured image credit: Paul Nylander] Friends, right here and now, one quantum away, the…
In this article we’ll look at how to implement the Elo rating system in code.
What do modern cloud workloads look like? And what does that have to do with new chip designs? I found these gems in Peter DeSantis's ReInve...
Sometimes I see unsourced, unclear, vaguely mystical claims about K being the fastest array language. It happens often enough that I'd like to write a long-form rebuttal to these, and a demand that the people who make these do more to justify them.
I know so many super-talented developers who share the same achilles heel: CSS. Instead of trying to “outrun” CSS, this article explores why leaning in and going deeper can be a tremendous boon for your development life and your career.
a guided introduction for first-timers
You can mount code from your development machine into a container and save yourself tedious waiting times during development.
Teardown and analysis of electronics. Integrated circuit design analysis.
I had thought that SABRE, a joint development of IBM and American Airlines, was the first computerized airline reservation system, going live in 1960. However, “The Univac Air […]
The story of buying a software company out of bankruptcy and our plan to grow it.
For sqlite-utils issue 250 I needed to locate some test CSV files that start with a UTF-8 BOM.
Who wouldn’t want a live preview for writing their great content? If you happen to be running Rails with Hotwire, it’s surprisingly easy with a small Stimulus controller.
22nd May 1990. The two Yemens, north and south, become one. The mood of the world seems to be for the dissolution of old animosities. In that same week, East and West Germany sign a treaty to begin reunification, the US and USSR agree to destroy their chemical weapons, and the World Health Organisation stops…
Published: 08-04-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
Our on-the-ground reporter gauges developer reactions to the Python Steering Council's latest decision regarding pattern matching.
One of the easiest ways to start visualizing data is to turn a table into a heatmap: every cell gets a colour, the higher the number the brighter the colour. Unfortunately, this is often a fairly unrewarding exercise, yielding graphics that look like plaid or tartan fabric. Part of the problem is that the rows and…
A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021119 points14 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
This is the first part of a planned five-part series (I, II, III, IV, V) covering some of the basics of fortifications, from city walls to castles and field fortifications! We are going to discuss …
An introduction to raymarching in C++ with diffuse Phong shading and ASCII-terminal output.
This is the last post I plan to do on parsing LLVM’s bitcode, at least for a while. I’ll keep working on the various libraries that I’ve started under the mollusc umbrella, but they won’t be accompanied by regular posts anymore — I’d like to refocus on writing smaller, less dense (read: lower-pressure) posts for a…
