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A promenade of PyTorch
Musings on navigating the tech bubble with philosophy and self-improvement.
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The Great Theorem Prover Showdown
Functional programming and immutability are hot right now. On one hand, this is pretty great as there’s lots of nice things about functional programming. On the other hand, people get a little overzealous and start claiming that imperative code is unnatural or that purity is always preferable to mutation. I think that…
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Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game
The story of changing a single byte
1534
Understanding the C/C++ memory model
I know that a lot of people struggle with understanding the memory model introduced in C11/C++11. In a recent conversation I was alerted to the existence of this blog post, which while correct (by …
1535
Exploring Word2Vec
In my previous blog post, I explored some of the early ways of word embeddings and their shortcomings. The purpose of this post is to explo...
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A Deep Dive into Monte Carlo Tree Search
(This was originally a sponsor talk given at PyCon 2018. Unfortunately there is no video.)
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Lessons on product and marketing from the growth of Domino’s Pizza
Startups can learn some of the most valuable lessons on product and marketing from the growth of the world’s biggest pizza chain. The story of Domino’s Pizza is a hero’s… Keep reading
1538
Just what does “code as data” mean anyway? (2014)
Recently, I’ve seen popular articles on macros and metaprogramming in Nimrod and Elixir . Both of these are wonderful metaprogramming systems, to be sure, but I couldn’t help but imagine some in the audience smirking inwardly – and occasionally less inwardly. What odd syntax! How out-of-place they are! If only there…
1539
UTF-7: a ghost from the time before UTF-8
On Halloween this year I learned two scary things. The first is that a young toddler can go trick-or-treating in your apartment building and acquire a huge amount of candy. When they are this young they have no interest in the candy itself, so you are left having to eat it all yourself.
1540
A response about dep and vgo
Peter Bourgon has a web site, and this is that web site.
1541
How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing
Tokyo has rightly been getting some plaudits for housebuilding of late, and this post brings together some stats that illustrate just how impressive its record is. First, some definitions and conte…
1542
The deepest problem with deep learning
Some reflections on an accidental Twitterstorm, the future of AI and deep learning, and what happens when you confuse a schoolbus with a…
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Paper is dead, long live paper programming
It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I love to program "by hand." I happen to practice a degree of ascetical programming practices, and I believe that they help me to more deeply internalize and understand problems, ultimately delivering higher quality solutions. One of
1546
OAuth for the Open Web
OAuth has become the de facto standard for authorization and authentication on the web. Nearly every company with an API used by third party developers has implemented OAuth to enable people to build apps on top of it.
1547
Three Meanings of E=mc²
It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe.
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Rust Ownership Explained with Python
Mostly software: Rust, machine learning, and P2P systems. Previously, games and cocktails.
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iOS 12: Core Data External Binary Data Storage Becomes Corrupt
On iOS 12, binary data stored in Core Data with the External Storage option gets corrupted/goes missing on every second save of the context.
1553
Playing Mortal Kombat with TensorFlow.js
While experimenting with enhancements of the prediction model of Guess.js, I started looking at deep learning. I’ve focused mainly on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), specifically LSTM because of their “unreasonable effectiveness” in the domain of Guess.js. In the same time, I started playing with convolutional…
1554
An ingenious vintage German cycle map (2014)
We cycled the Swiss part of the Rhine Cycleway last week, with our folding bikes neatly stowed in suitcases for the flight. A combination of cycle.travel (natch), the Cicerone guide, and the excellent MapOut app guided us safely along the way: a very modern combination of mapping styles.
1555
What does code readability mean?
Programmers complain about readability and talk about bad code and unclean code, and the difficulties they run into trying to understand and maintain that code. What do we mean by readability? What makes code unreadable?
1556
Why is nuclear fusion so hard?
Why does water fall out of an inverted cup? Before considering nuclear fusion, let's consider something much more familiar. If you turn a...
1557
Notes on the Go2 Generics Draft
These notes are based on the August 27 2018 design draft for generic types in Go2.
1558
Age of Invisible Disasters (2017)
Privacy, Power, & Protection In The Cyber Century2018148 points108 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
1400 words, 5 minutes. The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on 28th December 1879 when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed while a train was passing over it from Wormit to Dundee, killing all 70 people aboard.
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Whole House Fan and Evaporative Cooler
In dry climates it's common for people to use evaporative ("swamp") coolers; same idea as sweat evaporating off your skin cooling you off. The downside is that they increase humidity in the air, and if it's already pretty humid then that can make things uncomfortable. This means evaporative coolers are rarely used…
1560
What's in those mysterious cabinets?
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus