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Linux tracing systems and how they fit together
Linux tracing systems & how they fit together
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The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
Data analysis reveals 50% drop in San Francisco startup funding, with Series C & D rounds falling 66-75%. Key insights on shifting venture capital trends in 2016-17.
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Too many people are buying cars using financial products they do not understand
It was free!” announces Bob the Dinosaur, an adorable moron from the Dilbert cartoon. Bob is driving a bright red convertible. “They just make you sign papers!”, he elaborates. That cartoon is a qu…
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Some Insights from a Julia Developer
In this post I would like to reflect a bit on the Julia programming language. These are my personal views and I have had more than a year developing a lot of packages for the Julia programming language. After roaming around many different languages including R, MATLAB, C, and Python; Julia is finally a language I am…
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URLs are UI
What a great title. 'URLs are UI.' Pithy, clear, crisp. Very true. I've been ...
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Motive.c: The Soul of the Sims (1997)
This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997.
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What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
You can find anything and everything on the internet, yet nothing that explains how to track cell phones. Let us clarify right away, we are not talking about how to track your own cell phone in cas…
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How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)
Introduction Companies ask for a GitHub profile. Recruiters ask for a GitHub profile. The question “Do you contribute to open-source?” is now one of the most common questions asked in p…
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When not to use deep learning
I know it’s a weird way to start a blog with a negative, but there was a wave of discussion in the last few days that I think serves as a good hook for some topics on which I’ve been thinking recently. It all started with a post in the Simply Stats blog by Jeff Leek on the caveats of using deep learning in the small…
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An Interactive Introduction to Quantum Computing
This article was originally written in 2014, but has had some minor improvements in December 2017 and January 2018 when I received some useful feedback after the article had unexpectedly been posted on Hacker News in December 2017.
823
Rethinking the D-Bus Message Bus
Later this year, on November 21, 2017, D-Bus will see its 15th birthday. An impressive age, only shy of the KDE and GNOME projects, whose collaboration inspired the creation of this independent IPC system. While still relied upon by the most recent KDE and GNOME releases, D-Bus is not free of criticism. Despite its…
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C++17 is formally approved
[revised 9/8 to reflect that there is no need to wait till the next WG21 meeting] As I mentioned in my Kona (March) trip report, WG21 (the ISO C++ committee) completed work on C++17 at our March me…
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Algorithmic Solution to My Insomnia
I’ve struggled with insomnia for all of my adult life. It began in college and has waxed and waned in severity ever since, correlating with stress levels…
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ANTLR Mega Tutorial
The definitive ANTLR mega tutorial on ANTLR4. Learn everything you need to know; with code in JavaScript, Python, Java and C#.
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Carp, a compiled Lisp with type inference and a borrow checker
As some of you might know, I recently became enamoured with a new programming language, Carp. While you might have caught me fawning over it already, in…
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Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation
Yesterday Ryan Mandelbaum, at Gizmodo, posted a decidedly tongue-in-cheek piece about whether or not the universe is a computer simulation. (The piece was filed under the category “LOL.…
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LastPass: Security done wrong
Disclaimer: I am the author of Easy Passwords which is also a password manager and could be considered LastPass competitor in the widest sense. Six month ago I wrote a detailed analysis of LastPass security architecture. In particular, I wrote:
833
How to conduct a good programming interview
Any software engineer who has ever looked for a job has had the interview experience: being locked in a small room for an hour, asked to write code to solve some arbitrary programming task, while being grilled by one or two interviewers whether or why the code they've written is correct.
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Why is this Go faster than the equivalent Java?
At work there is a tradition of a Friday quiz being posted by the winner of the previous week. I missed out on the most recent one due to having to duck off early to do my tax but the problem was …
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Bitcoin mining on a vintage Xerox Alto: very slow at 1.5 hashes/second
I've been restoring a Xerox Alto minicomputer from the 1970s and figured it would be interesting to see if it could mine bitcoins. I coded u...
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IOCCC Flight Simulator
The IOCCC Flight Simulator was the winning entry in the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. It is a flight simulator in under 2 kilobytes of code, complete with relatively accurate 6-degree-of-freedom dynamics, loadable wireframe scenery, and a small instrument panel.
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Why isn't everything normally distributed?
Heights are normally distributed because height is determined by many factors. But why are other things with many inputs not normally distributed?
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Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting
Every Frame a Painting is officially dead. Nothing sinister; we just decided to end it.
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Migrating 1200 databases from MySQL to Postgres
Once Upon a Time there was a company called Base7Booking that by the beginning of 2016 it was supporting around 1200 databases on MySQL 5...