Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,223 posts.
How does the brain work? While neuroscience provides insights on small-scale processes and overall behavior, we don’t know much for sure about the learning and processing algorithms in between. In this blog post, I will give an introduction to what we know. Let’s take an engineering perspective and play evolution: How…
"He's done it again!" was my first thought as I looked at the back of a postcard sized Pixar flier [1] which was covered in code. In the lower right corner, the blob of statements and expressions had been signed by none other than Andrew Kensler. For those who are not familiar with him, Andrew is the programmer who…
My thesis on Amiga ASCII art translated to English.
Scaling out operation with read replicas and avoiding the downside of stale reads by observing replication progress.
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
When I teach courses on Python for scientific computing, I make this point very early in the course, and tell the students why: it boils down to Python being a dynamically typed, interpreted language, where values are stored not in dense buffers but in scattered objects. And then I talk about how to get around this by…
The first time I heard about Flat Earthers, I thought the idea was a joke. Surely nobody would believe something so crazy. I didn’t think about it again for a while. Until I started seeing celebrities, including famous basketball players, claiming the world is flat The rise of this phenomenon puzzled and concerned me…
A look at some of the factors determining the performance of new M3 chips compared to the M1 and M2 versions, and how not to compare them.
Don't Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit
This is a new series I’m going to start doing, much in the same spirit as YC’s Request for Startups . RFC doesn’t mean “ Request for Comments ” — although comments are of course welcome — but rather “Request for Co-founder.” RFC posts will be deep-dives on products and problems I find interesting or that I’m…
Imagine you are new to Rust and you want to learn some async programming. Writing a chat server is a common way to start, scope is small enough to contain in a blog post, yet it is complex enough to learn most of what you'll need to build async servers in Rust. One DuckDuckGo query and we are off to the races…
A bunch of reasons to write code in 2026
It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday, 1st October, 15:15 BST, to be precise, when Peter, an office-mate of mine, leaned away from his terminal and said to me, " Mario, I'm having a little trouble sending mail. " Knowing that msg was capable of confusing even the most capable of people, I sauntered over to his…
It is not often I am blown away by a piece of hardware. My Hall of Fame features the 1991 Super Nintendo, the 1995 3dfx1, and the 2010 Intel's Serie 520 SSD [1] . This past month my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 [2] joined the club.
In 2017 the company I worked for in Toronto got acquired by Yelp. The software engineers in my company (including myself) were asked to move to San Francisco. At the end of 2017 we moved, and I spent most of 2018 there. With the year coming to an end, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on my time there.
As a supporter, I would love not to feel this way
SVG, short for <em>“scalable vector graphics”</em> is a format for, well, scalable vector graphics. In this article I summarize my opinion of the format, what its problems are and suggest what could be done to improve things.
Why the poorest people in the world spend fortunes burying their dead
Today, I want to address an issue with statements involving chance. To demonstrate, let’s first consider a statement that doesn’t involve chance:
The Japanese government seems incapable of getting their act together so that they can provide meaningful data to the public.
This page describes the errors that I have seen most frequently in undergraduate mathematics, the likely causes of those errors, and their remedies.
Most undergraduate computer sciences courses teach students about tail call optimization (TCO) , and even if you don't have a formal computer science background the concept is talked about enough that you might be familiar with it anyway, especially if you've ever done any functional programming. However, I think the…
I write about Startups, coding and Physics
Let's abuse a bug in java.lang.String
This was a long one–I spent a fair bit of time with the Orange Pi 6 Plus over the past few months, and what I expected to be a quick look at another fast ...
Engineers earn more money than we need, and the world is full of interesting problems that don’t promise a financial return. Why are the…
If you look at a “Web3” offering and just think of it as a pump-and-dump onto retail investors, everything will make much more sense.
