Economist. Policy Entrepreneur. Geek. Co-recipient of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. University Professor at NYU. Focused on urbanization; cooperation at scale of millions and billions; science; technology; economic development; long-term growth; code as language.
The editorial department of well-known Dutch broadcaster RTL News recently asked for my assistance. Multiple tax files of Dutch citizens had been published via www.docplayer.nl and no one could explain – where did these files come from? Who would have thought that my research would lead to the discovery of one of the…
It should not be difficult to love Amazon. To consumers, it offers choice and convenience. Countless internet ventures have relied on its cheap, flexible cloud computing services to start and scale…
Isaac Asimov, in one of the anthologies he edited, mentioned reading some astronomical news back in the early 1960s about neutron stars. Being a science popularizer as well as a science fiction author, he was inspired to write a science essay about neutron stars. This was read by a few people but then more or less…
If you have decided to develop your game engine, you may be wondering where to start, what books to start reading, etc. If you are in this situation, I recommend getting a copy of the following books:
So today we look inside these amazing cats that can somehow keep on wavin’ using less than 15 microwatts (!) of power. If you are into either ultra low-power or extreme design-for-manufacture, the you will want to see what is inside of these guys!
The paradigms of programming Floyd, CACM 1979 (Also available in ) A couple of weeks ago we looked at Dan Bernstein’s very topical “thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0.” From the gene…
Introduction This article gives an overview of LocustDB [1], a new and extremely fast open-source analytics database built in Rust. Part 1 gives some background on analytical query systems and my g…
A blog on landscape architecture and related fields
For my contact page, I wanted a generic calendar icon to let people view my diary. Calendar icons are almost always a skeuomorph of a paper calendar, but I wondered if I could make it slightly more useful by creating a dynamic icon. Here it is, an SVG calendar which always display's today's date: The background image…
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
I developed an application to display and control Android devices connected on USB. It does not require any root access. It works on GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
Another privacy nightmare. An airline wants its cabin crew to know your birthday and favourite drinks order, to better personalise its service to you. My first instinct is to recoil in horror. It sounds like every dystopian sci-fi epic. But why do I feel this way? Partly it is the lack of genuine personality behind…
This map is now available in app form! WiFox is available on the App Store and Google Play. Finding an open wireless connection in many airports isn't always easy, or possible, without a password (or local phone number which is stupid). The difficulty of getting online is why I asked you for and created an…
This post is not meant to be prescriptive. It’s also not intended to be another “Quitting Google to pursue my passion for X” article because, well, I haven’t been able to pass the interview there yet. This is a telling of my story that I hope will inspire those who are thinking about quitting to take the leap.
Learn the image optimisation strategies I employed to shrink the page weight on my homepage from 1.1 MB to just under 450 KB
Learn how (and why) to make your app faster by optimizing JS, CSS, images/fonts and other things
No, not that one . Or that other one . The letters "MSN" have meant so many things to so many people, a term that's been overloaded with a thousand different meanings. In the same way they throw the words "National Lampoon" onto any random movie to indicate that it claims to be a comedy, they slap the "MSN" label onto…
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…
Some applications, such as todo lists, need to maintain a user-defined order of items. The challenge is that the order is arbitrary and can change when the user rearranges items:
Note: The demos below require WebGL2 support . If you are running a browser without WebGL 2 support, user “petercooper” on Hacker News has helpfully recorded a video and GIFs and for me.
Good performance practices are still needed when developing fast web experience.
A lot has changed since my last post nearly a year ago. I want to write about my experience coming from a ML-family language to a Lisp. It’s not very informa...
There was a paper recently where a research team trained a machine learning algorithm (a GAN they called AttnGAN) to generate pictures based on written descriptions. It’s like Visual Chatbot in reverse. When it was just trained to generate pictures of birds, it did pretty well, actually.
