On February 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, an American Patriot Missile battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The Scud struck an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around 100 other people. A report of the General Accounting office…
When you’re trying to get people to switch from a competitor to your product, you need to understand barriers to entry, and you need to understand them a lot better than you think, or people …
Where are all those great developers? The first time you try to fill an open position, if you’re like most people, you place some ads, maybe browse around the large online boards, and get a ton of …
Recent CPUs from Intel requires a binary called the “Management Engine” (Intel ME, or ME for short). This binary is one of three parts required if a business elects to use Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT), which Purism avoids. Purism laptops can function with a neutralized and disabled ME, as we have tested…
Understand Spanner's TrueTime and external consistency, ensuring globally consistent reads and writes across the distributed database.
Some people claim that unit tests make type systems unnecessary: "types are just simple unit tests written for you, and simple unit tests aren't the important ones". Other people claim that type systems make unit tests unnecessary: "dynamic languages only need unit tests because they don't have type systems." What's…
Paying taxes in America doesn’t need to be difficult. But it's kept that way by the lobbying efforts of tax prep companies that profit from confusing tax forms.
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.) Recently, I had my head torn off by a b…
Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water?
Even the church had its hippies –Coase does not need math –Avoid lawyers during Oktoberfest –The expat life ends one day –People who have…
This PEP describes an addition to the standard library called Data Classes. Although they use a very different mechanism, Data Classes can be thought of as “mutable namedtuples with defaults”. Because Data Classes use normal class definition syntax, y...
Very few think the world is making progress. In this article, we look at the history of global living conditions and show that the world has made immense progress in important aspects.
I. Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn’t, James Scott had to write it a century later.…
[This post has mostly been replaced/supplanted with a more thorough analysis in Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences] I. One idea that kept coming up in the comments to the thread on signal-boos…
Proton's transparency report with aggregate statistics of legal orders from the Swiss authorities, covering Proton Mail, Proton Drive, and Proton Calendar.
A look at the Go GC strategy
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In Pew Research Center polling in 2001, Americans opposed same-sex marriage by a margin of 57% to 35%. Since then, support for same-sex marriage has steadily grown.
Joe Bonneau dives deep into systems using dice to generate random passphrases and introduces EFF's three new wordlists.
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Here’s a theory you hear a lot these days: “Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empir…
The data series and methods we use to construct our graph of the growing gap between productivity and typical worker pay best capture how income generated in an average hour of work in the U.S. economy has not trickled down to raise hourly pay for typical workers.
At present the world is partitioned into a finite number of large, discrete time zones. A time zone is an area on Earth where all of the clocks are set to the same time. An example of a time zone is America/Santiago, an area which covers continental Chile. All the clocks in this ...
Encoding business logic in types
Today, The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor ...
How common are armed conflict and peace between and within countries? How is this changing over time? Explore research and data on war and peace.
When The Joel Test first appeared, one of the biggest sore points readers reported had to do with writing specs. It seems that specs are like flossing: everybody knows they should be writing them, …
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After a lengthy design process (https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/8450) and preliminary foundations in Julia 0.5 (/blog/2016-10-11-julia-0.5-highlights#vectorized_function_calls), Julia 0.6 includes new facilities for writing code in the "vectorized"...
