How to Write a Spelling Corrector
I figured they, and others, could benefit from an explanation. The full details of an industrial-strength spell corrector are quite complex (you can read a little about it here or here ). But I figured that in the course of a transcontinental plane ride I could write and explain a toy spelling corrector that achieves…
The new MacBook Pro is kind of great for hackers
A million hot takes have been posted about how the late-2016 MacBook Pro with USB-C is the undeniable proof that Apple doesn’t care about…
Linux debugging tools you'll love
New zine: Linux debugging tools you'll love
Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)
ART OF MONEY GETTING
Cheap HDMI capture for Linux
Lately I have had the need to do real time video capture from HDMI devices as of late for a project, and while looking around the internet found that all of the capture cards that are aimed at gamers (windows / OSX support only) or full blown production capture (Very expensive, more inputs than I need). The other…
Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Mi…
NoScript is harmful and promotes malware
NoScript proudly calls itself a security extension advertising itself as an extension with “whitelist based pre-emptive script blocking approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even not known yet!) with no loss of functionality…”
A minimal raytracer
How my quest to make a business card sized raytracer got a little out of hand.
Chinese Markets Halted, Equities Plunge Another 7%
Sea of Red in Asia There's another bloodbath in Asian equities his morning, the second in a week. click on chart for sharper image C...
Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (2008)
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not al…
Why do old statues have such small penises?
Reader question: “Why do all old statues have such small penises?” The reader who sent me this felt that it was a question that was maybe too silly for my blog, but – firstly – there ar…
GitHub Code Search – Programmers' Goldmine
Learning new language or framework can sometimes be a struggle. Traditional approach is to read documentation which explains the concepts, and provides simple examples. Sometimes that might be enough, but what those documentations are often lacking are some advanced examples and usages in real projects.
How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools
From Markdown to paperback and Kindle without proprietary software.
What I found wrong in Docker 1.12
The Sad State of Docker
Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart
This data sculpture depicts a map of housing prices in San Francisco. It's a map of the city, torn at the seams. The height of each area represents the average price per square foot for recent home sales. Where neighboring areas are close in value they are connected, but if neighboring areas are too far
Intel will add deep-learning instructions to its processors
Some of the latest Intel processors support the AVX-512 family of vector instructions. These instructions operate on blocks of 512 bits (or 64 bytes). The benefit of such wide instructions is that even without increasing the processor clock speed, systems can still process a lot more data. Most code today operators…
Corporate Media Gatekeepers Protect Western 1% from Panama Leak
Whoever leaked the Mossack Fonseca papers appears motivated by a genuine desire to expose the system that enables the ultra wealthy to hide their massive stashes, often corruptly obtained and all involved in tax avoidance. These Panamanian lawyers hide the wealth of a significant proportion of the 1%, and the massive…
Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1989)
HEY NEWS-YCOMBINATOR , I think you're looking for my articles explaining electricity. This is the 1989 page of raw unedited notes NOT A FRIGGIN' ARTICLE!!! You're all critiquing a wad of crap written on napkins, while not actually reading any of the finished articles. WHY?! Perhaps try these instead: ...
Frog and Toad are Cofounders
The Characters you loved as a child, all grown up and working in San Francisco
JavaScript libraries should be written in TypeScript
Open Source Freelancer
Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013)
I’ve been thinking about the lessons distributed systems engineers learn on the job. A great deal of our instruction is through scars made by mistakes made in production traffic. These scars are useful reminders, sure, but it’d be better to have more engineers with the full count of their fingers.
Taking Over DigitalOcean Domains via a Lax Domain Import System
A Hacker's Blog of Unintended Use and Insomnia.