1651
Facts about smell (2014)
The home of typing by Alice Bartlett 👩🏻💻
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,330 posts.
1652
How to deal with dirty side effects in your pure functional JavaScript
If you start learning about functional programming, it won’t be long before you come across the idea of pure functions. And as you go on, you will discover functional programmers appear to be obsessed with them. “Pure functions let you reason about your code,” they say. “Pure functions are less likely to start a…
1653
A Swiss Dress from the 16th Century (2015)
(Urs Graf 1517 Since the whole dress on my woodcut isn’t really visible and doesn’t provide any specific details, I collected woodcuts made by Urs Graf, and sorted them into chronologic…
1654
DIY puller RC flying wing airplane with Kline–Fogleman modified airfoil
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1655
“Stateless” sync using version vectors
Isolating cloud sync and persistent storage in an app architecture.
1656
Memory-Level Parallelism: Intel Skylake versus Apple A12/A12X
Modern processors execute instructions in parallel in many different ways: multi-core parallelism is just one of them. In particular, processor cores can have several outstanding memory access requests "in flight". This is often described as "memory-level parallelism". You can measure the level of memory-level…
1657
Recurrent Neural Network Tutorial for Artists (2017)
Recurrent Neural Network Tutorial for Artists
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1659
Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?
Around this time last year, I wrote a post dissecting the decline of The Simpsons from its peak in the mid 90s finding that the golden age of the show spanned an incredible 214 episodes. As a comparison, Friends, which seemed to have been on TV forever, managed 236 episodes...
1660
A timesyncd failure and systemd's lack of debugability
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…
1661
Building a Treasury Bond Ladder
A US treasury bond ladder is a great alternative to a high-yield savings account or CDs to invest short-term funds that you don't want to put at risk. Treasury bills, notes, and bonds (treasuries) are US government debt securities that may pay interest and return the principal at a specific time. While not FDIC…
1662
Software sucks
25 recent entries The horn of the Robert Smalls A difficulty in race-switching the Dukes of Hazzard On futile explanations Richard Blair Race-switching The Dukes of Hazzard Greek plural Erbaut Improved English-language month names I fix a thirty-year-old mistake Minced oaths? On the monobosom Partly about pie More…
1663
Repairing the card reader for a 1960s mainframe: cams, relays and a clutch
I recently helped repair the card reader for the Computer History Museum's vintage IBM 1401 mainframe. In the process, I learned a lot abou...
1664
The Dipole Drive: A New Concept for Space Propulsion
It’s a fascinating concept but I’d like to see a comparison toDr. Young Bae’s laser thruster concept for solar system travel.
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PostgreSQL 10: Partitions of partitions
PostgreSQL version 10 brings a much anticipated feature: (Native) Table Partitioning .
1667
Writing a recursive ascent parser by hand
I’ve been exploring various ways to write parsers. For a long time, I’ve used hand-written recursive descent for its straightforwardness, flexibility, and performance. There is another way—parser generators like Menhir , LALRPOP , or the venerable Bison use the bottom-up LR algorithm .
1668
A game of tag that’s been going for 20+ years
A group of high school friends has been playing an elaborate game of tag since reconnecting at a reunion almost 30 years ago. A few years ago, one of the player
1669
GDPR complaints against Google’s deceptive practices to track user location
Based on new research published today by BEUC’s Norwegian member Forbrukerrådet, seven consumer groups are filing complaints against Google with their national data protection authorities.
1670
Ruby’s Rack Push: Decoupling the real-time web application from the web
(UPDATED: updated to the PR are now reflected in the post) Something exciting is coming. Everyone is talking about WebSockets and their older cousin EventSource / Server Sent Events (SSE). Faye and…
1671
Typesafe Neural Networks in Haskell with Dependent Types
It seems these days like programming with dependent types in Haskell (and its advantages) is moving slowly but steadily to the mainstream of Haskell programming. In the current state of Haskell education, dependent types are often considered topics for “advanced” Haskell users. However, I can foresee a day where the…
1672
From VNC to reverse shell
Personal websites are weird. We are mostly past the era of having them, as things like twitter and hosted blog services like Medium have taken them over, but I’m a hold out. I run both my own blog, and have a landing page on the apex domain since the server that hosts the blog (Google App Engine + Cloudflare) is…
1673
Building a Distributed Log from Scratch: Sketching a New System
In part four of this series we looked at some key trade-offs involved with a distributed log implementation and discussed a few lessons learned while building NATS Streaming. In this fifth and final installment, we’ll conclude by outlining the design for a new log-based system that draws from the previous entries in…
1674
Why Rust closures are somewhat hard
My Rustic Ramblings
1675
My misalignment with Apple's love affair with Swift
During my life as a software engineer there only have been a few occasions where the design and principles of a language struck me as inherently beautiful and consequently inspired me to work with them.
1676
A Nerd’s Way to Walk Up the Stairs (2011)
Mathematics, applications of mathematics to life in general, and my life as a mathematician.
1677
Reading with a pencil
The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book. —George Steiner
1678
Validating UTF-8 strings using as little as 0.7 cycles per byte
Most strings found on the Internet are encoded using a particular unicode format called UTF-8. However, not all strings of bytes are valid UTF-8. The rules as to what constitute a valid UTF-8 string are somewhat arcane. Yet it seems important to quickly validate these strings before you consume them. In a previous…
1679
Game Programming Patterns: Double Buffer (2014)
Cause a series of sequential operations to appear instantaneous or simultaneous.
1680
Python as a declarative programming language (2017)
If you look at the programming languages benchmarks game, Python is one of the slowest commonly used programming languages out there . Typical programs written in pure Python average around 40 times slower than the equivalent program written in C or C++.