Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,330 posts.
I recently did a corporate TLA+ workshop and some people asked what TLA+ specs look like in practice. If you looked at the most common public examples, you’d probably come away thinking that people only used it for critical consensus algorithms. This is a problem for two reasons: first, it makes it harder to learn…
The EU is back to regulating tech companies, and getting the Internet wrong in the process. That, though, helps illuminate an approach that could work.
Update: On December 6th we released WordPress 5.0. It was definitely the most controversial release in a while, but the usage and adoption metrics are looking similar to previous releases. I’m look…
Introduction to the Rust language, standard library and ecosystem
I have recently been talking at small and mid-size companies, sharing engineering best practices I see us use at Uber, which I would recommend any tech company adopt as they are growing. The one topic that gets both the most raised eyebrows, as well the most "aha!" moments is
A guide to all the Magic Methods in Python
It’s not often I am able to write a patch that not only reduces memory usage, but increases speed as well. Usually I find myself trading memory for speed, so it’s a real treat when I can improve both in one patch. Today I want to talk about the patch I submitted to Ruby in this ticket. It decreases “after boot” memory…
(1) The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
For the system at work, I am on call one week every seven weeks. For most of the past ten years, I have been on organized on call rotations for the systems I have been developing. I think being on …
We can never know for sure because we don't have a comprehensive list of all the data. But what can we say probabilistically? Restating it like so:
Two decades ago when I first started working at Avid, one of the tasks I was assigned was porting our product (a consumer video editor - th...
The Personal blog and musings of Chris Penner, a designer, developer and future opsimath.
With OTP-21 came a new logging library in Erlang called logger . It comes as an attempt to offer a built-in alternative to long successful projects such as lager , which have seen years of battle testing and tweaking for performance. I've seen few articles written about the new logger and what it can do, so I've…
We dissect the building blocks of the infamous THX Deep Sound and recreate it by synthesizing the sound in Supercollider programming environment.
“I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit”-JRR Tolkien The map drawn by Christopher Tolkien for his father’s book is a simple and beautiful reference. Absorbed for hours by curious minds…
Update 28 Feb 2019: I added a new blog post with a slide deck containing the presentation I did for PyData Montreal. Introduction Short intro to Python extension objects in C/C++ Zero-copy PyTorch Tensor to Numpy and vice-versa Tensor Storage Shared Memory DLPack: a hope for the Deep Learning frameworks Babel…
Federal prosecutors have charged three men with carrying out a deadly hoax known as “swatting,” in which perpetrators call or message a target’s local 911 operators claiming a fake hostage situation or a bomb threat in progress at the target’s address — with the expectation that local police may respond to the scene…
Three points motivated me to write this — forming a Bermuda Triangle in which the average American’s savings disappear without any apparent cause. 1. Considerations on Cost Disease — the observation that certain costs (Education, Medical Care, Housing) have increased many times fas
Harvard and Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA), which is suing Harvard over discrimination against Asian-American applicants, have relea...
This post will probably only make sense to those deeply involved in Mastodon and the fediverse. So if that’s not your thing, or you’re not interested in issues…
Over the past two years, the biggest buzz among the geo chatterati has been Justin O’Beirne’s meticulously argued (albeit bizarrely formatted) feature-by-feature comparisons of Google and Apple Maps: their design choices, their data, their production processes.
The blog of Seva Zaikov
