1081
Mathematical Patterns That Eventually Fail
Sometimes patterns can lead you astray. For example, it’s known that $latex \displaystyle{ \mathrm{li}(x) = \int_0^x \frac{dt}{\ln t} }$ is a good approximation to $latex \pi(x),$ the number …
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,330 posts.
1082
Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?
Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the…
1083
The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
The paper Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure , by A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, and A. Rapisarda, has been receiving a lot of positive reception lately.
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Some Notes About How I Write Haskell
I want to say a few words on how I write Haskell as of 2017. Before I go on, I want to make very clear: this is neither a style recommen...
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My RustConf 2018 Closing Keynote
I promised two things when I did the closing keynote at RustConf 2018:
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1087
Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing's NES emulator
While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it…
1088
The Big List of RPG Plots
What follows is a scrap of trivia . . . my collection of RPG plots , in abstract form. I built this by examining the premises of hundreds o...
1089
Strange and maddening rules
There’s this popular idea among developers that when you face a problem with code, you should get out a rubber duck and explain, to the duck, exactly how your code was supposed to work.
1090
How fast is AMP really?
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
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The 8000th Busy Beaver number eludes ZF set theory (2016)
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
1092
Against Facebook
0xADADA produces code, essays, and films that explore…2018190 points88 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
On the commodification of attention, the abuses of unpaid microwork and strategies of resistance.
1093
Pwned Passwords in Practice: Real World Examples of Blocking the Worst Passwords
Back in August, I pushed out a service as part of Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) to help organisations block bad passwords from their online things. I called it "Pwned Passwords" and released 320M of them from real-world data breaches [https://www.troyhunt.com/introducing-306-
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Using /proc to get a process' current stack trace
Check out how you can use the proc filesystem to retrieve the kernel stack trace of a given process
1095
C++ Coroutine Theory (2017)
In this post I will describe the differences between functions and coroutines and provide a bit of theory about the operations they support. The aim of this post is introduce some foundational concepts that will help frame the way you think about C++ Coroutines.
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Using k-d trees to efficiently calculate nearest neighbors in 3D vector space
What would the world look like if there were only 16 colors? I use k-d trees to perform nearest neighbor search to find out.
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If monads are the solution, what is the problem?
Monads have exerted a curious fascination on programmers who turn to Haskell. The incomprehension of the newbies is matched in intensity onl...
1100
MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution
Why this post? Because there are rumours spreading about a presumed “MPEG-Video collapse” and Brownian motion-like initiatives trying to remedy – in some cases by the very people who have contributed to creating the “crisis”. Who is the author of this post? Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder and chairman of MPEG, but…
1101
Norris Numbers – Walls you hit in program size (2014)
My friend Clift Norris has identified a fundamental constant that I call Norris’ number, the average amount of code an untrained programmer can write before he or she hits a wall. Clift estimates this as 1,500 lines. Beyond that the code becomes so tangled that the author cannot debug or modify it without herculean…
1102
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
1103
My favorite principle for code quality
The Embedded Design principle, Jimmy Koppel's favorite principle for code quality, shown via caching code that looks fine but invites bugs.
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Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush
A few weeks before Christmas, an impish chart appeared on the Bank of England’s unofficial blog. It compared plunging productivity with the soaring shipments of smartphones. Typical productivity gr…
1106
Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success
Skill stacking is a strategy that you can use to achieve career success. You can use it whether you want to build a business or have a dream job.
1107
How I wound up finding a bug in GNU Tar
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
1108
A Small Look into the GameCube’s Copy Filter
A while back I was going through Dolphin’s issues page out of sheer boredom. I eventually came across issue 726 – Gamma setting has no effect. Out of curiosity, I clicked.
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Poland was shockingly liberal during the 1400s
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