Links 2013
I’m trying to build a jigsaw puzzle. I wish I could show you what it will be, but the picture isn’t on the box. But I can show you some of the pieces that snapped into place this year, and try to share a context for why they mattered so much to me.
On the Computational Complexity of MapReduce
I recently wrapped up a fun paper with my coauthors Ben Fish, Adam Lelkes, Lev Reyzin, and Gyorgy Turan in which we analyzed the computational complexity of a model of the popular MapReduce framework. Check out the preprint on the arXiv. Update: this paper is now published in the proceedings of DISC2015. As usual I’ll…
Why 'gallons per mile' is better than 'miles per gallon'
Why we should really be quoting fuel consumption figures as 'gallons per mile' and not 'miles per gallon'.
Why our startup failed
Écrits, photos et conférences de Thomas Parisot, développeur web indépendant.
Self-hosted Git Server
Moving off of Github and onto my own public Git hosting.
I Am an Indie iOS Developer – Part 2
I develop apps for iOS
Developing Service Oriented Architectures
Having spent the last four years rolling out a handful of service oriented architectures, some lessons are finally coming together, and this is an attempt at documenting them.
Designing a URL structure for BBC programmes
This is a post I've been meaning to write for the last 7 years. In the circumstances it might be more of a eulogy than a birth announcement but since the sub...
Naive Bayes and Text Classification I – Introduction and Theory
Naive Bayes classifiers, a family of classifiers that are based on the popular Bayes’ probability theorem, are known for creating simple yet well performing…
A Day of Communication at GitHub
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Improve Your Python: Metaclasses and Dynamic Classes With Type
Socolive TV phát sóng trực tiếp bóng đá hôm nay, link xem SocoliveTV sắc nét chuẩn HD. Cập nhật Lịch thi đấu, BXH, Highlight, Kết quả bóng đá mới nhất!
How to design an elliptic-curve signature system
Earlier this month a new paper by Naomi Benger, Joop van de Pol, Nigel Smart, and Yuval Yarom hit the news . The paper explains how to recover secret keys from OpenSSL's implementation of ECDSA-secp256k1 using timing information from "as little as 200 signatures"; ECDSA-secp256k1 is the signature system used by…
Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis
Recently there have been heated complaints that the culture of programming unfairly excludes some groups. They want to join the programming elite and get a spot at the startup trough. More power to…
Correlation is usually not causation. But why not?
Correlations are oft interpreted as evidence for causation; this is oft falsified; do causal graphs explain why this is so common, because the number of possible indirect paths greatly exceeds the direct paths necessary for useful manipulation?
My Experience at JuliaCon
Introduction Link to heading I just got home from JuliaCon, the first conference dedicated entirely to Julia. It was a great pleasure to spend two full days listening to talks about a language that I started advocating for just a little more than two years ago. What follows is a very brief review of the talks that…
An Example of Forensic Science at Its Worst: US v. Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair
In early 2014, I provided material support in what would end up turning around what was, in their own words, the US Army’s biggest case in a generation, and much to the dismay of the prosecution team that brought me in to assist them. In the process, it seems I also prevented what the evidence pointed to as an…
Building a F1 race simulator
One of the most fascinating aspects of modern Formula 1 is the use of computer simulations to predict car performances and race strategies. By the early 1990s, teams like Benetton had begun to deve…
Sherlock Holmes Debugging
I use the Sherlock Holmes method of debugging software. This means working backwards from a symptom to the series of causes which tell a story of the entire bug. It works for production outages and during development. Something that recently happened at my startup should be instructive.
The TechCrunch Bubble Index: Parsing Headlines to Quantify Startup Hype
The TechCrunch Bubble Index quantifies the startup funding environment by counting the number of headlines on TechCrunch relating to startup fundraises