Best of 2013

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2013. 857 posts.

Software Engineering
218

Computer Science in Vietnam

During my recent trip to Vietnam I took the opportunity to visit some schools and see how computer science was taught there. Officially, foreigners require permission from the department of education to enter schools. But it's much simpler (and the results are more representative) to simply show up unannounced. A…

229

Some Notes About Time

This is a trade-off: you can't represent a leap second, and your time is guaranteed to go backwards. On the other hand, every day has exactly 86,400 seconds, and you don't need a table of all previous and future leap seconds in order to format Unix time as human-preferred hours-minutes-seconds.

231

Deep Learning 101

Deep learning has become something of a buzzword in recent years with the explosion of 'big data', 'data science', and their derivatives mentioned in the media. Justifiably, deep learning approaches have recently blown other state-of-the-art machine learning methods out of the water for standardized problems such as…