Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,307 posts.
Let me start this article with a confession: I suck at writing parallel code. I have only a vague idea about mutexes, locks and other low level primitives for handling data between threads. And since I work mostly with Python, I tend to use multiprocessing (if I bother to parallelize at all) rather than threads…
Hi everyone! Here's part five of my favorite programming, computer and science books. If you're just joining, please see part one, part two, part three and part four. I've been collecting and researching science, math, physics, programming books since 2001 or 2002, so it's been close to 15 years of book research…
I just finished updating my C compiler and minimal CPU specification to include virtual memory. The process of adding virtual memory support to a CPU, a kernel, and a compiler toolchain has made me realize that there is a lack of good explanations for how all of these parts fit together. I also realized that a…
Unless you're a writer, I imagine you haven't been paying quite as close attention to the publishing industry and all its weirdness as I have, and that's a shame, because it's been really entertaining. Actually, entertaining isn't the right word. It's been insane, but the kind of insane that's unreasonably fun to…
I've been thinking about the consequences of the "wrong abstraction." My RailsConf 2014 "all the little things" talk included a section where I asserted: > duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction And in the summary, I went on to advise: >
Around 2006, my friend Dan Christensen created a fascinating picture of all the roots of all polynomials of degree ≤ 5 with integer coefficients ranging from -4 to 4:
You and me, we’re bad at a lot of things. But email isn’t one of those things, no matter how much it seems like it.
It is very fair to say that Apple is threatened by the potential rise of AI. Google, though, is also threatened by its inability to own customers’ attention. The solution for both companies m…
Hey All, This year I ran for Florida House of Representatives District 49 (Orlando). I lost, but I got 31% of the vote and I only spent $3000. My opponent got 69% of the vote and spent $100,000. I've been asked about this on Reddit, so I'm going to make a detailed post about how
This is great news: You can now install a GSM network using apt-get! Thanks to the efforts of Debian developer Ruben Undheim, there's now an OpenBSC (with all its flavors like OsmoBSC, OsmoNITB, OsmoS
AVFoundation, the low-level audio/video framework in iOS and macOS, does not accurately seek within VBR MP3s, making VBR impractical to use for long files such as podcasts. Jumping to a timestamp in an hour-long VBR podcast can result in an error of over a minute, without the listener even knowing because the…
I saw Joe Fernandez‘ tweet a few days ago and thought “he is making an important point.” too many young entrepreneurs talk about vc’s like they’re heroes and their blog posts are scripture — Joe Fernandez (@JoeFernandez) August 19, 2016 VCs are not heroes. We are just one part of the startup ecosystem. We provide […]
As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code? Or does it replace the old code slowly over time? In order to understand this, I built a little thing to analyze Git projects, with help from the formidable GitPython project.
pop culture + data science
I was out for drinks with Josh Long and some other friends from work, when he found out I "speak math." He had come across this …
A guide to a full-featured modern desktop FreeBSD installation
I remember the first time I had to write one of these puppies. I had just been promoted to manager at Yahoo back in 2000, and was running a small team. I was told to “write a status email covering …
Posts and writings by Datanice
So you know the Bayes rule. How does it relate to machine learning? It can be quite difficult to grasp how the puzzle pieces fit together - we know …
I think Rust is extremely well-suited for low level Linux systems userspace programming — daemons, services, command-line tools, that sort of thing. Low-level userspace code on Linux is almos…
Everyone agrees that housing in San Francisco is expensive, and that the high costs are hurting the city. But there is a lot of disagreement...
