Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,895 posts.
The State of Probabilistic Programming
For two weeks last July, I cocooned myself in a hotel in Portland, OR, living and breathing probabilistic programming as a “student” in the probabilistic programming summer school run by DARPA. The…
Categories for Programmers: The Yoneda Lemma
This is part 15 of Categories for Programmers. Previously: Representable Functors. See the Table of Contents. Most constructions in category theory are generalizations of results from other more sp…
How I Got a Job in Web Development
The long, honest story of how I taught myself web development and turned it into a career.
CRISPR Gene Editing
CRISPR is a recently discovered genomic tool that could potentially revolutionize genetic modification and editing, including gene silencing, editing, activating, and other crucial functions. It has made a big splash in the synthetic biology community, and mentions of CRISPR have started cropping up elsewhere in the…
Predominantly
Predominant.ly brings an element of serendipity back into music discovery, making the experience as personal and delightful as stumbling across a long-forgotten favourite in a second- hand record store.
Hopefully the last post I'll ever write on Dual EC DRBG
I’ve been working on some other blog posts, including a conclusion of (or at least an installment in) this exciting series on zero knowledge proofs. That’s coming soon, but first I want…
Building a ‘People Who Like This Also Like’ Feature
A while ago a friend of mine asked me how I would go about building a ‘People Who Like This Also Like …’ feature for a music startup he was working at. For each band or musician, he wanted to display a list of other artists that people might also be interested in.
Struct composition with Go
This is a quick Friday blog post to talk about a recent experience I had working on a piece Juju code that needed to capture the data being sent over a net.Conn .
Creating standalone Mac OS X applications with Python and py2app
In this tutorial we’ll be using py2app to create a standalone OSX application from a Python 2 or 3 source code with a simple Tkinter user interface. "py2app is a Python setuptools command which will allow you to make standalone application bundles and plugins from Python scripts. py2app is similar in purpose and…
How Laziness Works
So yesterday I saw someone ask about how many times the variable m gets evaluated in the following Haskell snippet:
Finding Closure in Rust
Closures in Rust are powerful and flexible, building on traits, generics and ownership.
IBash Notebook
Did you know that there's a Bash kernel for IPython Notebook? It even displays inline images. Could it ever be a convenient environment for doing data science? Would it be worthwhile to publish my book Data Science at the Command Line as a collection of notebooks?
Why Open Offices?
If one person is wrong, they’re wrong. If a lot of people, some of whom got extremely rich off of their wrong ideas, are wrong, there’s a good possibility I’m the wrong one. At …
Why We Use Go
Go is decidedly polarizing. While many are touting their transition to Go, it has become equally fashionable to criticize and mock the language. As Bjarne Stroustrup so eloquently put it, “There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses.” This adage couldn’t be…
What Holds Me Back from ClojureScript
Thoughts about programming, mostly
Turn Out the Lights, the Party’s Over
What party, you ask? The one with the mosh pit at LaSalle and Jackson in Chicago. The one held in the building that’s in the background image of this page.
Yubico with new 4096-bit keys and gpg-agent for ssh authentication
Collection of my projects and hacks.
Why do we care about Xiaomi?
Is Xiaomi just another handset maker, or something more? We may start seeing a lot less uniformity in how Android comes to market, and what it looks like. That matters to Google.