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Sid Meier's Civilization Inspired Budget
My wife and I were inspired by Sid Meier’s Civilization to look at our finances differently.
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Regression to the mean is the main reason ineffective treatments appear to work
Jump to follow-up “Statistical regression to the mean predicts that patients selected for abnormalcy will, on the average, tend to improve. We argue that most improvements attributed to the p…
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How to hire the best people you've ever worked with (2007)
An archive of the best articles from Marc Andreessen’s now defunct blog
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Installing Red Star 3.0, North Korea's homegrown operating system
Earlier this week, someone who goes by slipstream (“pulling data out of DPRK’s ass since 2014!”) posted a torrent of North Korea’s Red Star 3.0 installer. My first instinct was to download and run it, because installing software from North Korea, what could possibly go wrong?
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Telegram stalking
Update 20151216: This quick post got far more attention than expected. I regret not mentioning that the leakage can easily be prevented via a setting. In practice the problem remains, users in general will have no idea about this being a relevant setting to change and will stay with the default. The best discussion on…
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The Next Feature Fallacy
A few weeks ago, I read this tweet, and found myself nodding my head in vigorous agreement.
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Quasi-Polynomial Algorithm for Graph Isomorphism
Update (Dec. 14): The long wait is over! Here’s Laci’s paper on the arXiv. So far, I’ve read it only deeply enough to note that it contains the following sentence: A group G ≤ S…
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The Man Behind the Curtain: Commercial games with source code releases
I love peeking behind the scenes. I like knowing how things were made. I think most people do really, it's something built-in to humans.
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Why we are leaving Dropbox
I have been using Dropbox almost since its incubation back in 2007, ultimately ending up using 320+ GB for business and 375+ GB of personal…
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Some analysis of the 1M most popular sites on the web
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve run some analysis on the one million most popular sites on the web.
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32-bit x86 Position Independent Code – It's That Bad
Let's start by looking at a simple C function to be compiled as position-independent code (i.e. -fPIC , for use in a shared library):
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Implement a programming language from scratch
Implementing a programming language is an experience no programmer should go without; the process fosters a deep understanding of computation, and it's fun!
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K&R C (2014)
I was recently reading the C99 rationale (because why the fuck not) and I was intrigued by some comments that certain features were retired in C89, so I started wondering what other weird features …
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Clifford Algebra: A visual introduction (2014)
Clifford Algebra, a.k.a. Geometric Algebra, is a most extraordinary synergistic confluence of a diverse range of specialized mathematical fields, each with its own methods and formalisms, all of wh…
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Under the Hood of Amazon EC2 Container Service
In this post I explore the Amazon ECS architecture and what this architecture enables.
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Scaling Secret: Real-Time Chat
(This is the first of a series of technical posts I intend to write, and my goal is to help other engineers learn from the experience of…
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A brief introduction to OCaml
A couple of weeks ago I did an introductory presentation on OCaml at our local meetup groups @GotLambda . The material is in the form of one long interactive session, in a style similar to learnxinyminutes.com .
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A Tale of Two Zippers
Recently, Akiba took me to visit his friend’s zipper factory. I love visiting factories: no matter how simple the product, I learn something new.
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Assembly Language: Still Relevant Today
First, no, I don't do every thing in assembly. I use other languages too. Assembly language does have its place though. Second, a few of my points may not apply to highly complex processors; for example, self-modifying code may not work on a processor with an instruction cache .
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OS X 10.10.3 seems to have done something bad to wifi drivers
As a PSA (public service announcement), I'm reporting here that updating your Yosemite system to 10.10.3 is incredibly toxic if you use WiFi...
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A Western Kid Living in Communist Poland (2014)
In this HN thread I commented on how the story about the People’s Republic of Donetsk reminded me of my days in communist Poland.
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Outschooling in the Bay Area
Homeschooling is interesting because, if some new approach is going to disrupt the current education system and change it radically for the better, it seems likely it would come from outside the...
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Volkswagen and Cheating Software
Portuguese translation by Ricardo R Hashimoto For the past six years, Volkswagen has been cheating on the emissions testing for its diesel cars. The cars’ computers were able to detect when they were being tested, and temporarily alter how their engines worked so they looked much cleaner than they actually were. When…
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Atreus – kit to build your own mechanical keyboard
My last post documented my initial exposure to the wild world of custom keyboards and the numerous ways it's possible to improve on the conventional design. As I dug deeper into the topic, I was struck with the simplicity of the underlying concepts. While the Ergodox is a notable and admirable achievement of…