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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,828 posts.
Describes a simple Markov chain algorithm to generate reasonable-sounding but utterly nonsensical text, and presents some example outputs as well as a Python implementation.
Learn about attention mechanisms and how they are applied for text recognition tasks. We will also use tensorflow attention ocr to train our own number plate reader.
A case study of how Elixir is being used at Mozilla.
How Mozilla’s new language dramatically improved our server-side performance
I learned about socat a few years ago and am generally surprised more developers don’t know about it. Maybe I appreciate it all the more…
For the past two years we've been tinkering with a proof-of-concept decryptor for the Phobos family ransomware. It works, but is impractical to use for reasons we'll explain here. Consequently, we've been unable to use it to help a real-world victim so far. We've decided to publish our findings and tools, in hope that…
Today I saw a co-worker take a link from a specific line number in our team’s github repository and place it in the comments section of a user story. This is very helpful for those who need to see a quick reference to the code that could be causing a defect, but it’s wrong . Here’s what you need to do instead.
You may remember from high school what a polynomial is. If so, you may also remember how to multiply two of them. But what if I told you that the method you were taught is slow as F? In this post we will connect polynomials with the Fourier Transform and convolutions, and show you how to multiply polynomials with…
In my puzzle collection , there are many games in which you have to connect points together by edges, making a graph, and the puzzle rules say you must avoid making any loop in the graph. Examples are Net , Slant , and some configurations of Bridges (although not the default one). Loopy and Pearl also care about…
The PyPy team is proud to release both PyPy2.7 v5.7 (an interpreter supporting Python v2.7 syntax), and a beta-quality PyPy3.5 v5.7 (an in...
You may have seen isolation levels in the documentation for your database, felt mildly uneasy, and went on with life. Few day-to-day examples of using transactions really mention isolation. Most use the database’s default isolation level and hope for the best. It’s a fundamental topic to understand however and you’ll…
Linear Algebra Geometric Algebra Applications Multiplying Vectors Rotors Double Angle Formula Complex Numbers Characterizing B Ratios Conjugates Geometric Algebra is fascinating, and I believe solves a large number of problems that arise from a more traditional approach to vectors, but I've been very disappointed with…
I'm a designer and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, NY.
How I created a wall poster of knot diagrams.
There are a lot of neat things going on in deep reinforcement learning. One of the coolest things from last year was OpenAI and DeepMind’s work on training an agent using feedback from a human rather than a classical reward signal. There’s a great blog post about it at Learning from Human Preferences , and the…
During my internship at Jane Street 1 , one of my projects was a config editing tool that at first sounded straightforward but culminated in me designing a custom tree diffing algorithm using dynamic programming, relentlessly optimizing it and then transforming it into an A* accelerated path finding algorithm. This…
The Trail of Bits Assurance practice has received an influx of Go projects, following the success of our Kubernetes assessment this summer. As a result, we’ve been adapting for Go projects some of the security assessment techniques and tactics we’ve used with other compiled languages. We started by understanding the…
(update 26-Aug-2020: the MSVC team has recently added C11language support to their roadmap, hooray!)
Why we rewrote our backend from Python/Django to Node.js one week after launching Skald.
SwiftUI is currently the new trend in the Apple development world. And I wanted to give it a try. I did. However, in this post, I explain why I went back to AppKit for The Untitled Project’s authoring tools.
Why half a million people learned to program in Pascal, when you’d think they had no earthly reason to.
The second release candidate (RC2) for Nim version 2.0 is ready for testing.
Ongoing According to Repology , the latest packaged Git for Windows is version . To keep up with releases of Git for Windows, which includes Git Bash and the Mintty terminal emulator , see github.com/git-for-windows/git/releases or groups.google.com/g/git-for-windows .
Today we’re releasing Beta 1 of Android Q for early adopters and a preview SDK for developers. You can get started with Beta 1 today by enrolling any Pixel device (including the original Pixel and Pixel XL, which we’ve extended support for by popular demand!) Please let us know what you think! Read on for a taste of…
<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...
