In the good old days before the computer revolution, stocks were generally priced by traders using pencil and paper. Analysts would read news, study corporate financials, and then give ideas to traders. Trading happened in a physical trading pit. When a large player (Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan) wanted to …
I’ve done a lot of tweeting about systemd lately. My internal conscience constantly reminds me of John Allspaw saying that twitter is just pretty much perfect for snarky comments (paraphrase).
Allow me to present a simple thought experiment. Suppose we didn’t need to store our code as ASCII text on disk. Could we change the way we write – and more importantly read – symbolic code? Let’s assume we have a magic code editor which can read, edit, and write anything we can imagine. Furthermore, assume we have a…
If you want to invest in bitcoin for the long-haul, you should address the thorny issue of how best to store them. Since people love stealing bitcoins from others more than just about anything else in this world, all storage systems must first and foremost:
I have been doing interactive programming in ClojureScript recently. After having spent some time with it, I can easily say that when I return to projects that don’t have an interactive workflow I feel like I am in the stone ages.
This is part 3 of a series of blog posts looking at the security of the UK Government's web infrastructure. Britain's National Health Service is riddled with old and insecure WordPress-based websites. Many of these sites have severe flaws including being vulnerable to XSS attacks. There is absolutely no suggestion…
Reader Paul Kim pointed out an entry on Michael Tsai's blog about making dispatch_once fast . While the comment in the dispatch_once source code is fascinating and informative, it doesn't quite delve into the detail that some would like to see. Since this is one of my favorite hacks, for today's article I'm going to…
In terms of unreasonable effectiveness, the transformation to continuation-passing style (CPS) ranks with the Y combinator .
I never met Alexander Grothendieck. I was never in the same room with him. I never even saw him from a distance. But whenever I think about math — which is to say, pretty much every day ̵…
On January 12th, 2012 I went to Airbnb to give a talk about Storm at their tech talk series. It wa...
(Warning: these notes are rough – the main page is here and these are some notes I wrote for a few colleagues and then I kept adding to it until it became a longer page)
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I've read books on electronic devices for many years now; the convenience of having a huge library with me while traveling makes up for the lower quality of the presentation. I've read books on a selection of Palm devices, an old OpenInkpot compatible ereader, my phone and, most recently, on my Kobo Aura .
Type safety is the property of a programming language, ensuring its programs are well defined and creating a foundation for reasoning.
Editing binaries is a trick that comes in handy a few times a year. You don't often need to, but when you do, there's no alternative. When I mention patching binaries, I get one of two reactions: complete shock or no reaction at all. As far as I can tell, this is because most people have one of these two models of the…
I launched on a Tuesday and had 3 paying customers by the following Friday. That’s a small win for a young startup — here’s how it happened.
On my recent wanderings in Europe, I became quite enamoured by Google's latest revision of transit directions. Google has had transit directions for some time, but they have recently improved them, and linked them in more cities to live data about where transit vehicles actually are. The result not a mere incremental…
One of my favorite classic screensavers from back in the day was “Flying Toasters,” a part of the After Dark bundle.
Sony just launched its PlayStation Now service that lets you rent access to streaming games. The pricing seems a bit odd to some, but it actually uses some well established psychological tricks to …
Irken is a simplified, statically-typed dialect of Scheme . It uses an ML-like type system supporting parametric polymorphism (i.e., "let polymorphism") and algebraic datatypes . With type inference and a pattern-matching syntax, it could be considered ML with a lisp/scheme syntax .
