Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,330 posts.
Deep neural networks have been shown to be vulnerable to the adversarial example phenomenon: all models tested so far can have their classifications dramatically altered by small image perturbations . The following predictions were for instance made by a state-of-the-art network trained to recognize celebrities :
There’s a trend among start-ups (and some larger companies) that worries me: giving candidates “homework” assignments. Homework assignments lead to candidate abuse. Knock it off (or at least be reasonable). I’ve seen many friends and clients go through this. As a pre-screening round before an onsite
MySQL is the last major SQL database that has evolved beyond SQL-92 by introducing window functions (OVER) and common table expressions (WITH [RECURSIVE])
This is a new thing for me - I'm hosting a blog post by a colleague/friend - James Tanton. You can find James' original post here. One reason it's being re-hosted here is because Medium is apparently blocked in some countries: Egypt Malaysia ..... possibly others. It is astounding to me that mathematics - of all…
The majority of performance improvements in modern processors are due to increased core count rather than increased instruction execution frequency. To maximise hardware utilization, applications need to use multiple processes and threads. Servers that process discrete requests are a good candidate for both…
I. I got Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules For Life for the same reason as the other 210,000 people: to make fun of the lobster thing. Or if not the lobster thing, then the neo-Marxism thing, or…
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Can 2.3728639 be best? Personal site; note puzzles Josh Alman is a graduate student at a technical school in the Boston area. He is working on matrix multiplication, among other problems in complex…
Maybe the most misunderstood design pattern.
I discovered the existence of Lars Svendsen thanks to a forum discussion about - of all things - the modern apparel industry. One of the comments mentioned in passing his "Fashion: A Philosophy" and the idea of someone writing a philosophical analysis of Fashion intrigued me… so I checked out the book on Amazon. In…
We are not taught how to learn in school, we are taught how to pass tests. The spacing effect is a far more effective way to learn and retain information that works with our brain instead of against it. Find out how to use it here.
After we published this paper, Matthias Hauswirth kindly pointed out similarities between this work and the PL-detective , a body of work that is very closely related that we did not previously know. Less similar but also related---and entertainingly written up---is smeagol . Since we published the paper, we have…
Do you remember this exact day, twenty years ago? March 20, 1998. What exactly happened that day? I'll tell you what I did then. First a quick reminder of the state of popular culture at the time: three days later, on the 23rd, the movie Titanic would tangent the record and win eleven academy awards. … Continue…
EDIT: As pointed out in the Rust reddit thread, the Rust version can be modified to run faster due to a suble difference between ..=z and ..(z+1). I’ve updated the measurements with rustc0 be…
Lessons learned from mixins, render props, HOCs, and classes.
Reading someone else's code can be quite confusing. Hours can go on issues that should have been fixed in minutes. In this article, I would like to share some advice on how to write code that will be easier to understand and maintain.
In previous posts, we covered the most popular implicit use cases. What is left to complete the picture is the mechanics of implicits itself.
One attempt at rationalizing astrology is to say that the gravitational effects of celestial bodies impact our bodies. To get an idea how hard the stars and planets pull on us, let's compare their gravitational attraction to that of cows at various distances. Newton's law of gravity says that the gravitational…
I recently found myself dealing with TCP load balancing for a project and I've come to think that generic TCP proxies can't be implemented without substantial pain and how it makes TLS terminating proxies a bad idea.
This is a brief aside from my ongoing series about avoiding entity services. An interesting dinner conversation led to thoughts that I needed to write down. Amdahl's Law In 1967, Gene Amdahl presented a case against multiprocessing computers. He argued that the maximum speed increase for a task would be limited…
This document describes a weakness in Bitcoin Design that reduces the security of SPV proofs and therefore SPV Wallets. The weakness was discovered by me on August 2017, but during the responsable…
libcurl has done internet transfers specified as URLs for a long time, but the URLs you'd tell libcurl to use would always just get parsed and used internally. Applications that pass in URLs to libcurl would of course still very often need to parse URLs, create URLs or otherwise handle them, but libcurl has not ……
