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Singularity Chess
Board and Initial Setup You'll notice that the "squares" on the board are not really square— they range from more or less square ...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,219 posts.
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Twenty years of my blog
I started this blog on June 12th 2002—twenty years ago today! To celebrate two decades of blogging, I decided to pull together some highlights and dive down a self-indulgent nostalgia …
17284
High-performance tidy trees visualization (2022)
This article introduces the algorithm to draw non-layered trees in linear time and re-layout partially when some nodes change in O(d) time, where d is the maximum depth of the changed node.
17285
Opus 1.3 Released
Ever since version 1.1, Opus has been able to automatically detect whether its input is speech or music, and choose the optimal encoding mode accordingly. The original speech/music detector was based on a simple (non-recurrent) neural network, followed by an HMM-based layer to combine the neural network results over…
17286
Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer
Disclaimer: prepare for hair-splitting and nitpicking
17287
I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
I took me 7 years to admit I'd made a mistake in choosing a Z-Wave Wireless Lighting System. Finally I've taken stock and replaced it!
17288
Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
The bottleneck has shifted from implementation to specification.
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It's a shame what's happened to radio
Why I wouldn't enjoy returning to radio as a disk jockey.
17290
Steps Towards Happiness (2015)
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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Why Telegram is insecure (2015)
Telegram, the encrypted messaging app loved by terrorists, has been in the news lately. Terrorists have long used existing commercial and…
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If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling
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…
17294
Insurance is like gambling, don't overdo it
Insurance companies, like betting companies, need high margins to keep operating. You are paying that margin.
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When did SVB insiders begin to realize they were in trouble?
When did Silicon Valley Bank insiders begin to realize they were potentially in trouble?
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Letsencrypt, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Letsencrypt is a pretty neat concept: free secure certificates for web servers, in order to increase the adoption of HTTPS across the web. The basic idea is that certificates should be free, that the barrier to install them should be as low as possible and that updating certificates should be automated. It protects…
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js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read.
js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read. Pages that are empty without JS: dead to history (archive-org), unreliable for search results (despite any search engine claims of JS support, check it yourself), and thus ignorable. No need to waste time reading or responding. Also known as, if it’s not curlable, it’s not on…
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Fast midpoint between two integers without overflow
Let us say that I ask you to find the number I am thinking about between -1000 and 1000, by repeatedly guessing a number. With each guess, I tell you whether your guess is correct, smaller or larger than my number. A binary search algorithm tries to find a value in an interval by repeating … Continue reading Fast…
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Misidentifying talent
Out of context, you might think they were scouting actors or models, but these are baseball players ("A" is Lloyd Moseby, "B" is Jim Abbott, and "C" is Derek Jeter), ones that were quite good (Lloyd Moseby was arguably only a very good player for perhaps four years, but that makes him extraordinary compared to most…
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What happened to the US machine tool industry?
Machine tools – machines that cut or form metal – are the heart of industrial civilization.
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You can legally get and run WordPerfect for free
In fact, there are two free versions: one for Classic MacOS, made freeware when WordPerfect discontinued Mac support, and a native Linux version, for which Corel offered a free, fully-working, demo version. But there is a catch of course: theyre both very old and hard to run on a…
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Singapore Airlines Concorde
Sleek, supersonic, and short-lived. Here’s how Singapore Airlines’ Concorde service to London fell victim to politics, nationalistic jealousies, and soaring costs.
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My struggle to learn React
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
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Hindenburg’s Smoking Room
Yes, there really was a smoking room on the Hindenburg… even though the zeppelin was inflated with 7 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen...
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When did people favor composition over inheritance?
The phrase "favor composition over inheritance" has become one of those thought-terminating cliches in software design, and I always like to take a deeper look at those to understand where they come from and what ideas we're missing if we just take the phrase at face value without engaging with the discussion that led…
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Avoid Consumer Routers
Consumer Routers are not secure
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How to effectively evade the GDPR and the reach of the DPA
Musings on Information Security and Privacy Risk Management - Thierry Zoller.
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AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
Does AI-assisted cognition threaten human development? Explore the risks of AI-assisted thinking and learn strategies to use AI tools without freezing your critical thinking.
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FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter
After reading the book The AWK Programming Language (recommended!), I was planning to try AWK out on this year’s Advent of Code. Having some time off from work this week, I tried to implement one of the problems in it to get some practice, set up my tooling, see how hard AWK would be, and… I found I’m FP-pilled.
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I only know PHP. How do I write a Web application in Python?
Part of my Python FAQ. I only know PHP. How do I write a Web application in Python?