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Tallest Lego building with 4 pieces?
My daughter asked me: “Daddy, what’s the tallest structure we can build with those 4 pieces?”
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,470 posts.
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Terminal and shell performance
There’s a great MSR demo from 2012 that shows the effect of latency on the experience of using a tablet . If you don’t want to watch the three minute video, they basically created a device which could simulate arbitrary latencies down to a fraction of a millisecond. At 100ms (1/10th of a second), which is typical of…
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Why recursive data structures?
In this essay, we are going to look at recursive algorithms, and how sometimes, we can organize an algorithm so that it resembles the data structure it manipulates, and organize a data structure so that it resembles the algorithms that manipulate it.
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Things learned while running your own self-funded startup
Here's a brain dump of the things we've learned while running our business and shipping our first product ( Basis ). My experience at Valv...
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Think Bayes: Bayesian Statistics Made Simple (2012)
This HTML version of Think Bayes is provided for convenience, but it is not the best format for the book. In particular, some of the math symbols are not rendered correctly.
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As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail
Tomorrow, two high-speed rail lines open in France, providing new corridors for trains to slice through the countryside at 200 mph (320 km/h). One is a 302-kilometer link that will connect Paris to…
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A plan for open source software maintainers
It seems to me that this is a case where problems are in fact solutions to other problems. To wit:
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Curl’s backdoor threat
-- "Have you ever detected anyone trying to add a backdoor to curl?" -- "Have you ever been pressured by an organization or a person to add suspicious code to curl that you wouldn't otherwise accept?" -- "If a crime syndicate would kidnap your family to force you to comply, what backdoor would you be … Continue…
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Is PostgreSQL good enough?
tldr; you can do jobs, queues, real time change feeds, time series, object store, document store, full text search with PostgreSQL. How to,...
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How to Report a Bug to Microsoft
So you found a bug in one of Microsoft’s great works of software art. What do you do now? I realized that there isn’t a nice step-by-step guide online, so I will give you the low-down on how this process works. It’s not straightforward — Microsoft is a large company, and has probably thousands of calls or reports each…
341
Building a r/place in a weekend
On Friday I accepted a challenge to clone Reddit's /r/place in a weekend. And I did it, and its live, and its amazing: Being able to build this in a weekend isn't genius. Its possible because programming is made up of 2 activities: Making decisions (95%) Typing (5%) Reddit
342
On Conference Speaking
I’ve seen quite a bit of the world thanks to being invited to speak at conferences. Since some people are under the impression that serial conference speakers possess some special talents, I’d like to demystify my process by walking you through my latest talk from start to finish.
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Thirteen Years of Bad Game Code
Alone on a Friday night, in need of some inspiration, you decide to relive some of your past programming conquests. The old archive hard drive slowly spins up, and the source code of the glory days scrolls by... Oh no. This is not at all what you expected. Were things really this bad? Why did no one tell you? Why were…
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Tensorflow sucks
A detailed analysis
346
A Primer on Bézier Curves
A detailed explanation of Bézier curves, and how to do the many things that we commonly want to do with them.
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Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
The internet is getting noisy. Too noisy. Having grown up in the nineties, with 56k dial-up, I sometimes struggle to understand how little I'm accomplishing today with all the bandwidth I can leverage. There were some key factors that made the old internet so productive, by the way,
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Secret colours of the Commodore 64
In 1991 I was fourteen years old. It would be fair to say I was obsessed with computers. I proudly owned a brown ‘breadbox’ Commodore 64 with an exotic upgrade - an Oceanic 5.25” disk drive:
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Equihax
Trawling the darknet as one does, I came across this little simple page this morning. It claims to be the real EQUIFAX hackers, unlike the last darknet site that was soon taken down by morons. I ha…
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Neural Networks in JavaScript with Deeplearn.js
An extensive tutorial on how to implement a neural network in JavaScript with deeplearn.js to perform machine learning in JavaScript. You can bring neural networks to your browser by using the performance benefits of WebGL. Deeplearn.js makes it possible to implement a WebGL powered neural network ...
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Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community
A while back at the awesome maintainerati Ichatted with a few great fellow maintainers about how to scale really big opensource projects, and how github forc...
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DRM Is Toxic to Culture
In pursuit of market control now, deployers of DRM are robbing us of our culture in perpetuity by enclosing the future commons. It’s possible that you think that unauthorised use of copyright…
357
The Biggest and Weirdest Commits in Linux Kernel Git History
We normally think of git merges as having two parent commits. For example, the most recent Linux kernel merge as I write this is commit 2c5d955, which is part of the run-up to release 4.10-rc6. It has two parents:
358
Apache Arrow and the “Things I Hate About Pandas”
This post is the first of many to come on Apache Arrow, pandas, pandas2, and the general trajectory of my work in recent times and into the foreseeable future. This is a bit of a read and overall fairly technical, but if interested I encourage you to take the time to work through it.
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On Password Managers
It has come to my attention that people are Wrong On The Internet about password managers. This matters, because almost everybody should be using one. Herewith background, opinions, and a description of my own setup, which is reasonably secure.
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A look at my BBS Software from '93
The buzz around Mastodon’s federated social network has made me nostalgic about bulletin board systems in the early nineties. It was an era that is unknown to most people. It was social networking ...