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Notes on 416 Days of Treadmill Desk Usage
The personal website of author Neal Stephenson, unless it's been hacked.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,895 posts.
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Examining the core memory module inside a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe
The IBM 1401 mainframe computer was announced in 1959 and by the mid-1960s had become the best-selling computer , extremely popular with me...
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Let’s Build a Web Server, Part 3
“We learn most when we have to invent” —Piaget In Part 2 you created a minimalistic WSGI server that could handle basic HTTP GET requests. And I asked you a question, “How can you make your server handle more than one request at a time?” In this article you will …
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What Did Bohr Do at Los Alamos?
Along with almost getting hit by a car, he made important contributions to the atomic bomb's design.
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Deep Learning, NLP, and Representations
neural networks , deep learning , representations , NLP , recursive neural networks
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ARM server market
Microservers and the motivations for microservers have been around for years. I first blogged about them back in 2008 ( Cooperative, Expendable, Microslice, Servers: Low-Cost, Low-Power Servers for Internet-Scale Services ) and even Intel has entered the market with Atom but it’s the ARM instruction set architecture…
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Life Lessons from Machine Learning
What comes to mind when you hear the term “Machine Learning”? A bunch of programmers hunched over their computers in a dark room, working on something completely virtual & divorced from reality…
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Ghost Streets of Los Angeles
architectural conjecture :: urban speculation :: landscape futures
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Getting started with maps in Python
Kristoffer over at rpsychologist.com wrote a really nice tutorial on getting up to speed with maps in R. It looked something like this.
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Optimized Go gzip/zip packages, 30-50% faster
I have worked on optimizing the standard library deflate function, and I am happy to announce revised gzip/zip packages, that on x64 is about 30-50% faster with slightly improved compression. Project: https://github.com/klauspost/compress All packages are drop-in replacements for the standard libraries, so you can use…
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Market Rate is for Lobsters
Ernie Miller is a values-driven engineering leader, conference speaker, and lover of people based in Naples, Florida.
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How the Dutch got their cycling infrastructure (2011)
How did the Dutch get their cycling infrastructure? This question keeps coming back because it is of course relevant to people who want what the Dutch have. Road building traditions go back a long …
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Considering performance in the small is not “premature optimization”
DISCLAIMER : The following are my own personal opinions and are not shared, sanctioned or endorsed by anybody in particular, especially my employer. Any criticisms expressed herein are of a general nature and are neither inspired by nor directed at any person, entity, or product in particular. Links to other online…
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The button that isn’t
Is there a big red button that can launch nuclear war? No — but thinking about why there isn't is a nice way into the complexities of command and control issues.
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VW
Do you know the name Michael Horn ? He’s the CEO of Volkswagen of America . You know what’s going on with Volkswagen, right? Dieselgate? The fact that the software that controls the Diesel engine in some of their cars was specifically written to defeat emissions tests? Yeah, apparently that software could detect when…
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Why Deep Learning Works II: the Renormalization Group
Deep Learning is amazing. But why is Deep Learning so successful? Is Deep Learning just old-school Neural Networks on modern hardware? Is it just that we have so much data now the methods work b…
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Jython 2.7.0 Final Released
On behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that the final release of Jython 2.7.0 is available! It's been a long road...
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Magic: The Gathering Is Turing Complete (v5)
I'm assuming you're familiar with the basic idea of what a Turing machine is . There are a few parts to building one in Magic: a tape extending in two directions storing cells of a few different "colours"; a processing head that can read the current cell's colour, write a new colour and change its state if necessary…
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Turn any part of your screen into a playable level of Super Mario Bros
Screentendo is a desktop application that allows you to turn a selection of your screen into a playable level of Super Mario Bros. I’ve never built a Cocoa app or used Sprite Kit before, so it was …
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8088 PC Speaker MOD player: How it’s done
The last 100 seconds of 8088 MPH sound very different to the rest of the demo. The end tune is actually a 4-channel Amiga MOD file (which you can download here ) composed by coda . Playing back a MOD through PC speaker on such a slow machine has never been done before. Here is how we did it.
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Craig Federighi talks to John Gruber about Swift
Craig Federighi: I always end up seeking back to figure out what part I missed where the podcast started, and then I realize it just starts.