Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,330 posts.
The only real valuable thing is intuition. – Albert Einstein A year ago I got rid of my scale, a simple act that turned out to be the catalyst for a year’s worth of quiet introspection and experimentation in removing quantification from my life. A year later I’m quantifiably more ignorant about myself than I have been…
[Translations: Japanese] “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in … Continue reading →
John D. Cook, Greg Egan, Dan Piponi and I had a fun mathematical adventure on Twitter. It started when John Cook wrote a program to compute the probability distribution of distances $latex |xy R…
Suggested Citation: Bai, H. (2018) Evidence that A Large Amount of Low Quality Responses on MTurk Can Be Detected with Repeated GPS Coordinates. Retrieved from: https://www.maxhuibai.com/blog/evidence-that-responses-from-repeating-gps-are-random
Observations on Frank Herbert’s 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑒 series—the notes are probably overstated, the Butlerian Jihad was 𝑛𝑜𝑡 a robot uprising seeking to exterminate humanity, and precognition/prescience in the Dune universe appears to work backwards allowing for retro-causality and stable time-loops as exemplified by Leto II’s Golden…
If someone is worse at their job than a drunk person with Google, why do they still have their job?
Apple’s case before the Supreme Court is about standing; Apple has a strong case. That, though, doesn’t mean the App Store isn’t a monopoly — and that Apple isn’t increasing…
This summer, I am again working on Rust full-time, and again I will work (amongst other things) on a “memory model” for Rust/MIR. However, before I can talk about the ideas I have for this ...
Improving artificial intelligence research with scientific testing, design practice, and meta-rational choice of methods and criteria
Many desktop oriented operating systems try to provide various usability improvements and features, like quite useful Expose or Dashboard in Mac OS X or useless Tiles concept in recent editions of …
I had of late been lamenting the loss of the internet of the 1990s. A place where everything was obscure or new. If you saw something mainstream like a Disney princess, it was because someone had taken the time to handcraft an ASCII art portrait. Today if you type [disney] into the ubiquitous search engine , every…
In this article, we explore the possibilities allowed by higher inductive types. They enable a much more intuitive formalization of integers and new mind-blowing definitions of the (homotopical) ci…
Aaron Giles is a Seattle-area programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer.
The above shows my home-built digital clock. It uses Nixie-tubes for readout. In contrast to most other nixie-clocks being built these days, my clock does not use any transistor or IC for driving the tubes. Instead, the driving logic is built from neon lamps , together with resistors, capacitors and silicon diodes.
Patrick Collison started Stripe, dropped out of MIT, and reads 1–2 books a week. In this episode, he breaks down how Stripe was built, what most orgs get wrong about bets, why speed beats precision in decision making, and how to actually learn from the right people. It’s a masterclass in clarity.
In programming research, we say a lot about programs and languages, but very little about the actual process of programming. One simple trick that will make programming language research significantly more interesting is to think about programs not as expressions, but as a result of a sequence of interactions that…
Recent incident where Uber car was involved in an accident where a cyclist got killed has sparked many comments and opinions. Many blame…
I previously wrote a post on proof of work (PoW) and mining . The first half generated great interest but (apparently) failed to be universally persuasive. For example, CCRG (Ethereum’s multi-million dollar funded “research” organization) consists almost entirely of academics theorizing about proof of stake (PoS) .
I am a fond Clojure user, and love to use it for both server-side projects and small command-line tools. I love its expressivity and concision, and I like th...
This is part one of a two-part article. Part two is here. A while back somebody told me to check out MiniZinc. Eventually I did and really enjoyed it, so figured I’d write about it here. This is actually going to be a two part article. Right now we’re talking about what it is and how it works, and in the next post…
Describing three strategies of implementing type classes, aiming to clarify their behavior
How to solve linear systems that have many solutions, or those that have no solutions at all? That's the theme for a thick math textbook, of course, but from...
