Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,307 posts.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been devoting my free time to fleshing out the theory behind non-lexical lifetimes (NLL). I think I’ve arrived at a pretty good point and I plan to write various posts talking about it. Before getting into the details, though, I wanted to start out with a post that lays out roughly how…
October 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. ) How do you get good ideas for startups ? That's probably the number one question people ask me. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups? That might seem a stupid thing to ask…
The ability to privately communicate through the internet is very important for dissidents living under authoritary regimes, activists and basically everyone concerned about internet privacy.
The Amazon Dash is a $5 WiFi button that summons a truck to deliver you water or other stuff. Want your Dash to do something else? The popular approach is to sniff its ARP requests. This requires that Dash connect to your network, putting you perilously close to having some DUDE delivered with your IoT mood lighting.
I was inexplicably amazed by Lisp since the first day I've seen how Lisp programs look.
Today is my five hundredth day of using the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition exclusively as my mobile phone. This is a nice piece of hardware (go...
The Internet of Things is the name given to the computerization of everything in our lives. Already you can buy Internet-enabled thermostats, light bulbs, refrigerators, and cars. Soon everything will be on the Internet: the things we own, the things we interact with in public, autonomous things that interact with…
As part of my OCaml Labs research project, I implemented a new macro system for OCaml, based on a design by Leo White and Jeremy Yallop [1] .
I accidentally caused a little brouhaha last week - for which I would like to apologise. In my blog post about BMW's unencrypted software updates, I said: Judging from the files, it would appear that the infotainment system is made by Magneti Marelli with components by Wind River, AutoSAR, and Nvidia Tegra. Looking at…
In a previous post I wrote about how to build a ‘People Who Like This Also Like …’ feature for displaying lists of similar musicians. My goal was to show how simple Information Retrieval techniques can do a good job calculating lists of related artists. For instance, using BM25 distance on The Beatles shows the most…
Here are some tips and tricks that I learned the hard way when developing and deploying web applications written for node.js using Docker.
There are some subtle differences between the revisions of the C standard that makes it possible to create programs that behaves differentl...
This isn’t a post about politics. I do have opinions about the now infamous e-mail server (which will no doubt come out here), but when the WSJ folks made it possible to search the Clinton email releases I though it would be fun to get the data into R to show how well the igraph and ggnetwork packages could work…
If you’re familiar with my blog, you know I’ve lately taken a fancy to doing abominable things to my Intel GPU’s OpenGL driver.
This blog covers various issues I encounter and the (sometimes creative) solutions I apply.
There is hardly ever a good reason to invert a matrix. What do you do if you need to solve Ax = b where A is an n x n matrix? Isn't the solution A−1 b? Yes, theoretically. But that doesn't mean you need to actually find A−1. Solving the equation Ax = b is
Some people change their SSH port on their servers so that it is slightly harder to find for bots or other nasties and while that is generally viewed as an action of security through obscurity it does work very well at killing a lot of the automated logins you always see in /var/log/auth.log .
There is a pretty good comment on Hacker News (of all places) by nostrademons explaining why the DOM is not slow . Basically, all the DOM mutation operations are pretty trivial. Inserting and removing nodes, moving them around, setting an attribute, etc. It’s layout that takes a while and layout can be synchronously…
One of the most annoying problems in Swift is when the compiler gives an 'Expression was too complex to be solved in a reasonable time' error. I look at why this error occurs, how to avoid it and talk about how this should be solved in a future compiler update.
The Python Package Index, or as most call it “PyPI” is a central part of the ecosystem of Python. It serves as a central registry of names, helping to prevent collision between different projects as well as the default repository that most Python users go to when looking for software. Though it has its issues (of…
