2701
Power Bends Light (2019)
Some notes about acquiring power that I wish I'd understood years ago.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,290 posts.
2702
Something small, every day (2013)
It takes time to do anything worthwhile, but thankfully, we don’t need it all in one chunk. So this year, forget about the year as a whole. Forget about months and forget about weeks.
2703
Twenty Proofs of Euler's Formula: V-E+F=2
Many theorems in mathematics are important enough that they have been proved repeatedly in surprisingly many different ways. Examples of this include the existence of infinitely many prime numbers , the evaluation of \(\zeta(2)\), the fundamental theorem of algebra (polynomials have roots), quadratic reciprocity (a…
2704
CoreBGP – Plugging in to BGP
In this post I'll provide some of my personal experience and history working with BGP, and introduce a new BGP library, CoreBGP, which can be used to build the next generation of BGP-enabled applications.
2705
Explaining RNNs without neural networks
This article explains how recurrent neural networks (RNN's) work without using the neural network metaphor. It uses a visually-focused data-transformation perspective to show how RNNs encode variable-length input vectors as fixed-length embeddings. Included are PyTorch implementation notebooks that use just linear…
2706
Philip Anderson 1923-2020
I heard this morning about the death yesterday of Philip Anderson, at the age of 96. It’s not hard to make the case that Anderson was the most important condensed matter theorist of the twent…
2707
The field of “useful reals” between rational and real numbers (2019)
Most schools teach number systems the same way. First they teach natural numbers (or “counting numbers”), then integers, rationals, reals, and complex numbers, in that order. Rationals are countable and reals are not, but that’s okay. Once you start taking roots, you need a number system more powerful than a countable…
2708
Supersonic Electric Flight
This post is inspired by the recent press release about the Rolls Royce Accel, an experimental electric aircraft being built to attempt the electric speed record. Close friends know I’ve been…
2709
2710
IMAP Email Backup
Use imapgrab.py to backup IMAP email.
2711
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2713
Creating a Slack app that uses fewer resources
I recently created a macOS app called Slack Lite, which beats Slack's desktop app across a few performance metrics. Slack Lite uses Slack's official UI, so it's visually indistinguishable from the official client. Even so, Slack Lite uses 5x fewer threads, 3.5x less time to startup, and significantly less CPU. In the…
2714
Myst: the Drawbacks to Success
Robyn Miller, one half of the pair of brothers who created the adventure game known as Myst with their small studio Cyan, tells a story about its development that’s irresistible to a writer like me. When the game was nearly finished, he says, its publisher Brøderbund insisted that it be put through “focus-group…
2715
Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
Let structure emerge organically. When it’s imposed from the start, you prematurely constrain what may emerge and artificially compress the nuanced relationships between ideas.
2716
The FDA's perpetual process machine
Economist. Policy Entrepreneur. Geek. Co-recipient of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. University Professor at NYU. Focused on urbanization; cooperation at scale of millions and billions; science; technology; economic development; long-term growth; code as language.
2717
Bruce Perens: Invasion of the Ethical Licenses (2019)
About 23 years ago, I created the Debian Free Software Guidelines to help the Debian developers decide what software was permissible to include in Debian, which aspired to be 100% Free Software, and what should be consigned to a "non-free" repository upon which Debian would never depend. Nine months later, those…
2718
Finding Goroutine Bugs with TLA+
My job these days is teaching TLA+ and formal methods: specifying designs to find bugs in them. But just knowing the syntax isn’t enough to write specs, and it helps to have examples to draw from. I recently read Chris Siebenmann’s Even in Go, concurrency is still not easy and thought it would make a good case study…
2719
White hat social engineering: How to become an admin of a system
Warning: Half-satire, half-truth
2720
Lamphone: Real-Time Passive Sound Recovery from Light Bulb Vibrations
Recent studies have suggested various side-channel attacks for eavesdropping sound by analyzing the side effects of sound waves on nearby objects (e.g., a bag of chips and window) and devices (e.g., motion sensors). These methods pose a great threat to privacy, however they are limited in one of the
2721
Systems Thinking and Quality
Wise words from Russell Ackoff regarding systems thinking and quality improvement – and what we can learn from them
2722
Stop the Coronavirus Corporate Coup
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
2723
Fast high-level programming languages
Python and R are slow when they can’t rely on functionality or libraries backed by C/C++. They are inefficient not only for certain algorithm development but also for common tasks such as FASTQ parsing. Using these languages limits the reach of biologists. Sometimes you may have a brilliant idea but can’t deliver a…
2724
Flutter Web: A Fractal of Bad Design
How a misguided attempt to achieve cross platform UI leads to terrible experiences and kills the open web
2725
Classes are a way of writing higher order functions
Joe and I recently kicked off a re-read of SICP . I can say that it is the most interesting textbook I have gone through. Imagine, you begin with just 4 or 5 constructs, and you end up building algebraic equation solvers, circuit simulators, and even logic programming languages. Because you start off with such few…
2726
Homelab: Intel NUC with the ESXi Hypervisor
In this blog post I tell my experience mounting a minimalist homelab with a Intel NUC and the ESXi hypervisor.
2727
Conventions for Command Line Options
This article was discussed on Hacker News and critiqued on Wandering Thoughts ( 2 , 3 ).
2728
Apple’s Relentless Strategy, Execution, and Point of View
Apple’s announcement of “Apple Silicon” is important for many reasons. Delivering on such an undertaking is the result of remarkable…
2729
Raspberry Pi 400 teardown and review
Today Raspberry Pi Trading announced the Raspberry Pi 400, the latest in the series of small education-focused computers that started with the original Raspberry Pi in 2012. For years, people have come up with creative ways to hack a Pi into keyboards, like the Original Pi in an old Mitsumi keyboard, or the Pi 3 A+ in…
2730
Scaling Down Deep Learning
A blog by Sam Greydanus