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The worst tool for the job
Using the best tool for a job may slow things down. It may be "best" in a sense you don't need. The actual best tool might be relatively crude.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,290 posts.
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Twitter preconnects to the wrong domains
Twitter tried to reduce load times for external links, but made things slower instead. It mistakenly normalizes domains to a point where they’re no longer useful.
1443
Things I Learnt in 2020
For the past six months I have been sending out a weekly newsletter with things I learnt and read during the week. Some of those trivia are not trivial at all, so I decided to share the condensed crème de la crème of the Internet in this New Year special edition.
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RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps
This is a new series I’m going to start doing, much in the same spirit as YC’s Request for Startups . RFC doesn’t mean “ Request for Comments ” — although comments are of course welcome — but rather “Request for Co-founder.” RFC posts will be deep-dives on products and problems I find interesting or that I’m…
1445
Is Probability Real?
Today, I want to address an issue with statements involving chance. To demonstrate, let’s first consider a statement that doesn’t involve chance:
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Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports
The Japanese government seems incapable of getting their act together so that they can provide meaningful data to the public.
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The Most Common Errors in Undergraduate Mathematics (2009)
This page describes the errors that I have seen most frequently in undergraduate mathematics, the likely causes of those errors, and their remedies.
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A Sick Giant
Available today
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Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Snooping on the Pasteboard
This article provides an investigation of some popular apps that frequently access the pasteboard without user consent. These apps range from popular games and social networking apps, to news apps of major news organizations. We found that many apps quietly read any text found in the pasteboard every time the app is…
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Raspberry Pi – UASP, Trim, and Boot Performance via USB
In the past few weeks, I reviewed USB drive performance on the Raspberry Pi 4, and the importance of UASP support for USB drive performance. Both posts generated great discussion, and there were three things I wanted to cover in this follow-up, namely: Which drives support UASP Real-world performance benchmarks TRIM…
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How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act
This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. It’s been updated with new information about the U.S. Paycheck Protection program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan progra…
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Anxiety as an algorithm
Founder, Investor, Author
1453
Towards Tactic Metaprogramming in Haskell
Isn’t it weird that we treat source code as text? That is, we have this extremely well-structured and strongly-typed object — the abstract syntax tree — that exists conceptually in our minds, and in actuality inside of our compiler, but for some reason we pretend it’s just a pile of bytes and edit it byte-by-byte…
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Visual Introduction to Self Supervised Learning
A visual introduction to self-supervised learning methods for visual representations.
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C.I.A. Lacing (2014)
Tutorial for C.I.A. Lacing shoes, in which straight segments are interpersed with one or more visible crossovers at different positions as a form of covert signalling.
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Fast-Growing Remote Startups
Note: Enter your email to get notified when we launch our job board for hot remote companies! “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don’t ask what seat.” -Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook One of the greatest myths about remote work is that there aren’t phenomenal companies that are hiring remotely. […]
1458
Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVa: Steel Yourself
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020218 points30 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week, we continue our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week, we looked at how a blacksmith reshapes our iron from a spo…
1459
Cache Oblivious Algorithms
Cache-Oblivious Algorithms Cache-oblivious algorithms seemed incredible to me when I first heard about it in 6.854 (Advanced Algorithms). It’s relatively straightforward to imagine algorithms that utilizes information about page size $B$ and cache size $M$ to create efficient data structures. However, cache-oblivious…
1460
Do I need to go to university?
Instead of asking “Is university good?”, ask “Do I have something more compelling to do?”. Instead of “Should I do a PhD?”, ask “Where can I find the best environment to grow as a researcher?”.
1461
The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon
Some of the world’s largest Internet firms have taken steps to crack down on disinformation spread by QAnon conspiracy theorists and the hate-filled anonymous message board 8chan . But according to a California-based security researcher, those seeking to de-platform these communities may have overlooked a simple legal…
1462
In Defense of the Modern Web
I expect I'll annoy everyone with this post: the anti-JavaScript crusaders, justly aghast at how much...
1463
IBM's Lost Decade
TL;DR: Down and to the right I wasn’t going to do this post until I learned IBM PR is out browbeating reporters (one of the rare activities where the company is still world class) for being “too ha…
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A look at the die of the 8086 processor
The Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month, 1 so I made some high-res die photos of the chip to celebrate. The ...
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Go modules have a v2+ problem
Go has a problem. Go modules place a strange naming requirement on modules version 2 or greater. Module names on modules v2+ must end in the major version ala …/v2 , and communication of this rule has been weak. It's non-obvious, and the community at large does not understand it.
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DRY Is a Trade-Off
DRY, or Don't Repeat Yourself is frequently touted as a principle of software development. "Copy-pasta" is the derisive term applied to a violation of it, tying together the concept of copying code and pasta as description of software development bad practices (see also spaghetti code ).
1469
Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020216 points205 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Hey folks! Fireside this week, but next week, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the blog (the first post went up May 3rd) we’re diving into a look at Helm’s Deep in both the book…
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