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Functools – The Power of Higher-Order Functions in Python
<p> Python standard library includes many great modules that can help you make your code cleaner and simpler and <code class="inline">functools</code> is d...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,220 posts.
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AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning
After 10 years as an AWS customer and open-source contributor, they deleted my account and all data with zero warning. Here's how AWS's 'verification' process became a digital execution, and why you should never trust cloud providers with your only copy of anything.
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The integrated timetable of Switzerland
When people talk about great nation-wide public transit systems, names such as Japan or Switzerland are often mentioned. In this article I will show what makes Switzerland’s network so unique and why it is has become so popular.
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DNS doesn't “propagate”
DNS "propagation" is actually caches expiring
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The Anti-Productivity Manifesto
After a barrage of recommendations on my twitter, I finally ended up reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. The central premise of the book is simple: everyone has got about four thousand weeks to live, and spending that limited time chasing efficiency is wrongheaded. The message seems old. The entire…
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Minecraft with object impermanence
I generally am uninterested in generative AI that's too close to the real thing. But every once in a while there's a modern AI thing that's so glitchy and broken that it's strangely compelling. There's this generative AI knockoff of Minecraft that fails so hard
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Ruby and Its Neighbors: Smalltalk
Smalltalk was the second major influence on Ruby's design. A different kind of influence, since almost nothing of Smalltalk's syntax made into Ruby. But many of the details of how objects work are directly inspired by Smalltalk, including the idea that every piece of data is part of the object system.
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Apple Slaps Developers In The Face
[Adobe would like me to make it clear that the opinions below are not the official views of the company and are entirely my own.] By now you have surely heard about the new iPhone 4.0 SDK language that appears to make creating applications in any non-Apple-approved languages a violation of terms. Obviously Adobe is […]
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Plausibly deniable encryption (2020)
It is safe to assume that in any useful cryptosystem C k there exists at least one person with access to the key k . An adversary with sufficient leverage can bypass the computational cost of a conventional attack by exerting their influence on this person.
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The 'Hidden' Costs of Great Abstractions
In the world of computing, we tend to abstract away complexity. Doing so seems liberating. It enables us to focus on the bigger picture. Unfortunately, in doing so, the fidelity of our understanding often decreases. We sometimes end up blinding ourselves.
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If someone asks if you have any questions, ask a question
Let's revisit one of the most humiliating (and expensive) moments of my life. It happened a decade ago and even today I cringe and seethe when I think about it.
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There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
1 post published by Georgia Ray on May 2, 2021
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How to take meeting notes
Sep 10, Thu, 2020
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How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control
Credit card fraud can be a huge problem for subscription boxes. Here's how we got our situation under control.
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Reaching the Unix philosophy's logical extreme with WebAssembly
Xe Iaso's personal website.
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A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
It is Friday. KPMG , the consultancy behemoth that delivers business Venn diagrams for outrageous prices, informs us that 70 percent of UK business leaders will keep spending on AI even when they can’t prove it does anything — the consultancy helpfully suggests we stop calling it “investment” and start calling it a…
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Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
EDIT: Be warned that this post is angry. If you’re easily offended when someone goes on a rant, then leave now because I’m very unforgiving in several places below. The tone of my writing is unusually harsh, but the people whose work I’m talking about deserve it, and here’s why. Even though I had been working with…
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The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
Not too long ago the A2 motorway split the city of Maastricht in two. The internationally important road connection cut off the east of the city from the centre. The space where the road once was i…
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Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go
L19 = 208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935
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ARM and Lock-Free Programming
I was inspired by the release of Apple’s M1 ARM processor to tweet about the perils of lock-free programming which led to some robust discussion. The discussion went pretty well given the inanity o…
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On Succeeding Steve Jobs
A new Apple CEO would need credibility with two highly disparate factions: Apple’s rank-and-file employees, and Wall Street. The only candidates who could satisfy both factions, to any degree, already work at Apple.
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