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Final Statement on the LambdaConf Controversy
We want professional ethics and a great FP conference
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Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
Some people on the internet are getting very excited at the (unconfirmed) reports of an "Earth-like" exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri , a mere 4.25 light-years away from Earth. If correct, the planet is orbiting in the liquid water zone around our nearest stellar neighbour and is of the same order of mass as the…
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A bug story: data alignment on x86
This sounds unusual. Who ever wants to do this in real life? Normally, we only see code like this as primary school assignments or compiler benchmarks. However, this time it happened in real life.
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Milking the iPhone
It feels like cracks are forming at Apple's edges. The company is straining to push out hardware updates. Supply issues are getting worse. Apple is reportedly moving away from selling beloved products like stand-alone displays and wireless routers. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Amazon, and
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Shrink Go binaries 7x with this one weird trick
Ok, I lied, there’s no weird trick. However, you can easily reduce a Go binary size by more than 6 times with some flags and common tools.
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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 4: What's running on the system
This post describes our continuing efforts to restore a Xerox Alto. We checked that the low-level microcode tasks are running correctly a...
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Introduction to strace
There will come a time when you will find yourself asking “What the heck is that process doing?”. To uncover the mysteries behind the behaviour of a process, we have a tool called strace .
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Extracting city blocks from OpenStreetMap data
Extracting blocks within a city as GeoJSON polygons from OpenStreetMap data
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Combinatorial Music Theory (1991)
graph theory, music theory
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The Strict Aliasing Situation Is Pretty Bad
One thing that works well in practice in cases where you really don’t want to process single bytes at a time is to use a union for going from one type to another. Granted, writing one member of a union and reading from a different one also isn’t allowed per the standard, but every compiler I’ve come across allows it…
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Seattle: Highest Minimum Wage, Lowest Unemployment Rate
Doomsayers Keep Getting It Wrong on Higher Minimum Wages In Seattle, unemployment has fallen and business has boomed since the city raised its pay floor. Bloomberg, October 21, 2016 In 2014, Seattle passed an ordinance to eventually raise the minimum wage in the city to $15 an hour, giving the Pacific Northwest…
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My personal burnout – Lessons learned
Last week I was on the My Life For The Code podcast and had a really good talk with Shawn Rakowski (He has Continue Reading
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$99 Mineserver: The Devil Is in the Details
An update on my kids' Mineserver project
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Inside Automattic's Remote Hiring Process
How can Automattic consistently hire the best people without ever having a single voice conversation? Let’s face it, hiring is tough. When you ask startup founders what their biggest challenge is, …
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Why I’m never buying HTC again
I’m not a tech blogger, much less an activist. I usually never write reviews about tech gizmos. I just buy devices that I think will be useful, and if my expectations aren’t met, I just…
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On the modern web, ISPs are one of your threats (2015)
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Tracking Down a Python Memory Leak
In this post, you will discover how I used various tools to track down a memory leak in my Python application under Windows!
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Stack traces in GHCi, coming in GHC 8.0.1
Bluesky: @simonmar.bsky.social Github: simonmar Email: marlowsd@gmail.com LinkedIn: Simon Marlow
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GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon
Foreword This story relates my experience at a typical web startup. We are running hundreds of instances on AWS, and we’ve been doing so for some time, growing at a sustained pace. Our full o…
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What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population
In this notebook we'll compare the median annual income of software engineers to the average annual income (GDP per Capita) in 50 countries.
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What does a kilowatt hour look like?
Some time ago I came across a very good read by David McCay - Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air. I’ve seen many good reviews of the book, so it didn’t t...
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Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
ASDF , the de facto standard build system for Common Lisp, has been vastly improved between 2009 and 2014. These and other improvements finally bring Common Lisp up to par with "scripting languages" in terms of ease of writing and deploying portable code that can access and "glue" together functionality from the…
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Long Names are Long
One smart thing Google does is rigorous code reviews. Every change, before you can land it, gets reviewed in at least two ways. First, someone on the team does a normal review to make sure the code does what it’s supposed to.