Years ago, while taking a numerical methods course, I wrote some code to calculate the expected number of shared birthdays in a group. The code is very simple: each attempt constructs a vector of N birthdays, then counts the duplicates. The outer loop runs millions of attempts, and calculates the mean number of shared…
Blog and Portfolio site for Forrest Smith, aka ForrestTheWoods
Last year, a group of Media Lab students visited Shenzhen with, bunnie, an old friend and my hardware guru....
On the existential crisis in gaming and the role of game design.
This is basically an expanded explanation of what I did after reading this tutorial by Marwan Burelle and then sitting down and trying to write my own implementation, so the steps are going to be fairly similar. The main implementation differences are that my version is simpler and more vulnerable to memory…
*Note: Please read all italicized technical words as if they were in a foreign language. The fall semester of my senior year, I was having some serious self-confidence issues. I had slowly come to …
Last night, a fellow Hacker Schooler challenged me to a running-time contest on the classic eight queens puzzle. Naturally, I pulled up my trusty …
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
Randy Olson explains why it's impossible to work your way through college nowadays.
Right now, people are burying Windows 8. Even people you'd normally expect to be on Microsoft's side are unhappy with it. Me, though? I kind of like it.
A comparison of MVC web frameworks with React.js and ClojureScript circa 2014.
UPDATE: Awesome Screenshot 3.7.12 now offers an 'opt-out' setting to address this (but it's on by default) - read my new article here.
A New Car UI - How touch screen controls in cars should really work.
There is no clear, widely-accepted definition of Functional Programming. It is a collection of related featues which cohere well into a very useful style of programming.
This post follows up on OCaml for Haskellers from Edward Z. Yang (2010) and my own Haskell for OCaml programmers from earlier this year. Note The latest version of this document can be found online at https://dr-knz.net/rust-for-functional-programmers.html. Alternate formats: Source, PDF. Prologue Rust for C…
If you don’t follow NSA news obsessively, you might have missed yesterday’s massive Snowden document dump from Der Spiegel. The documents provide a great deal of insight into how the NSA brea…
When I am in a foul mood, I have a surefire way to improve my outlook – I build something. A foul mood is a stubborn beast and it does not give ground easily. I
"Emails show [Chris Cristie]'s aides did plan bridge gridlock," says Salon . To a transportation engineer, the aides are innocent: bridges can't have gridlock. While we often say "gridlock" to mean "bad traffic," it has a technical meaning.
So it looks like Samsung is offline this morning . This shouldn't bother me - I don't work for them and their network isn't my problem. However it turns out that my Samsung Smart TV thinks there's no internet if there's no www.samsung.com :( - using tcpdump I started looking at what the TV was trying to contact when I…
