Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,290 posts.
The great question after yesterday’s hearing was whether prosecution counsel James Lewis QC would continue to charge at defence witnesses like a deranged berserker (spoiler – he would), and more importantly, why? QC’s representing governments usually seek to radiate calm control, and treat defence arguments as almost…
Thinking about inbox management, RSS feeds, and email overload
A guide to scaling product & engineering teams from $0 to past $100M ARR
How to cope even when work is hard.
You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Bu…
While the last few updates about Precursor have focused on evidence-based trust and security, this update is more about the process of making Precursor itself. There is an essential link between evidence-based trust and understanding the manufacturing process: to convince yourself that something has been constructed…
Convolution is probably the most important concept in deep learning right now. It was convolution and convolutional nets that catapulted deep learning to the forefront of almost any machine learning task there is. But what makes convolution so powerful? How does it work? In this blog post I will explain convolution…
Engineer friends often ask me: Graph Deep Learning sounds great, but are there any big commercial success stories? Is it being deployed in practical applications? Besides the obvious ones–recommendation systems at Pinterest, Alibaba and Twitter–a slightly nuanced success story is the Transformer architecture, which…
Today I found another way to draw the Sierpinski triangle using pure CSS.
Have a pair of gangly Stanford grads built the perfect mousetrap?
The Game of Life is based on very simple rules, but artificial neural networks struggle to learn its rules through the classic deep learning training process.
When COVID-19 burst on to the scene, tests quickly showed that the everyone was susceptible - no pre-existing antibodies were found that bound to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This led to dire predictions that over 80% of the population might eventually fall ill. Now more than six months in, this has not happened, and it does…
After seeing it in action at FOSDEM (from afar, as the crowd was too large), I decided to buy a Pinebook Pro for personal use. From the beginning, the intention was to use it for pkgsrc development, with NetBSD as the main OS. It was finally delivered on Thursday, one day earlier than promised, so I thought I would…
Note: if you're just looking for performance review templates and examples, head to the templates page [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/templates-as-inspiration-for-software-engineers/] to download them. I've had about a dozen performance reviews during my decade-long software engineering career. Some of them were…
A global pandemic, apocalyptic fires, and the possible descent of the US into violent anarchy three days from now can do strange things to the soul. Bertrand Russell—and if he’d done no…
When the lads at DMA Design started making the original Lemmings , they envisioned that it would allow you to bestow about twenty different “skills” upon your charges. But as they continued working on the game, they threw more and more of the skills out, both to make the programming task simpler and to make the final…
Naval Officer? Voltaire? William Pitt Lennox? Herb Caen? Howard Jacobs? Norman R. Augustine? Anonymous?
Last week, I reached an exciting milestone in my career as a programmer. For the first time in my life, I ran code directly on hardware , with no Operating System sitting between the bare metal and my code.
The European Global Navigation Satellite System Galileo has recently been suffering from frequent "almost disruptions", most likely partially due to Corona, and possibly also due to Brexit, but in any case due to some historical stinginess. Before I explain what is going on, I should hasten to say that most days of…
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.
Note: this post was written for Lean 3; the latest version, Lean 4, is a very different language. Turn back the clock to 2009: a confused physics major newly infatuated with math and computer science, I enrolled in MATH 273: Numbers and Proofs at the University of Calgary. This wasn’t my first encounter with…
This post explains how to implement heap allocators from scratch. It presents and discusses different allocator designs, including bump allocation, li…
Google acquired YouTube for US$1.6bn in 2006. In 2022, YouTube could be worth over US$180bn achieving a +110x return. Analysis of YouTube revenue and usage statistics and financial metrics.
I frequently read about proposals for new solar power developments where the resulting power is moved great distances to less sunny places, such as northern Europe from the Sahara, the US North Eas…
Salesforce-Slack and Penguin-Simon & Schuster both show a failure to enforce antitrust laws creates monopolies.
Microsoft Corp. has executed a coordinated legal sneak attack in a bid to disrupt the malware-as-a-service botnet Trickbot , a global menace that has infected millions of computers and is used to spread ransomware. A court in Virginia granted Microsoft control over many Internet servers Trickbot uses to plunder…
It’s been a long time since my last pizzabox post - over a year! There’s been a lot going on in my life but I’m excited that lately I’ve had a lot more free time , which means more time to explore the world of workstations and share with you!
