The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)
Of the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, where did it go, and what does it tell us about how we should talk about the history of the bomb?
The Facebook Current
The Senate hearing about Facebook was a bigger deal than it might have seemed, both because it happened and because of what was said.
Vue CLI 3: A Game Changer for Front End Development?
If you thought Vue couldn't possibly get any better, then you'll be shocked by Vue CLI 3. It's a major leap forward in both flexibility and ease of use. It provides your Vue projects with instant access to the best build tools from the frontend world, combining them seamlessly with sensible defaults. At the same time…
Value Type Hygiene
Briefly put, types in L-world are ambiguous, leading to unhygienic mixtures of value operations with reference operations, and uncontrolled pollution from null s infecting value code.
Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird?
[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this a…
Review of the Purism Librem 13
Towards the end of last year, I got a new laptop: the Purism Librem 13. It replaced the Lenovo ThinkPad X250 that I was using previously, which maxed out at 8 GB RAM and was beginning to be unusabl…
Why are amplitudes complex?
[By prior agreement, this post will be cross-posted on Microsoft’s Q# blog, even though it has nothing to do with the Q# programming language. It does, however, contain many examples th…
Common Lisp Standard Draft
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Parsing Excel Spreadsheets with Swift's Codable Protocols
How to parse the Excel .xlsx spreadsheet format with Swift? How is this implemented?
Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune
Louis Castle first became friends with Brett Sperry in 1982, when the two were barely out of high school. Castle was selling Apple computers at the time at a little store in his native Las Vegas, and Sperry asked him to print out a file for him. “I owned a printer, so I invited him over,” remembers Castle, “and he…
EnclaveDB: A secure database using SGX
EnclaveDB: A secure database using SGX Priebe et al., IEEE Security & Privacy 2018 This is a really interesting paper (if you’re into this kind of thing I guess!) bringing together the security…
Monitoring and Observability in the .NET Runtime
.NET is a managed runtime, which means that it provides high-level features that ‘manage’ your program for you, from Introduction to the Common Language Runtime (CLR) (written in 2007):
Things nobody told me about being a software engineer
My dad started teaching me Basic when I was about 7 years old, and since about that age I knew that I wanted to build software for a living. It was obviously a fun and useful thing to do, and something that I could do well. But there is a big — and I mean Grand Canyon-scale BIG — difference between “programming” and…
Facebook Has Got an Instagram Problem
Mark Zuckerberg dropped a bit of bombshell during the Q4 2017 earnings call. He announced that Facebook daily active users (DAUs) have fallen across some key markets, including the US. COO Sheryl S…
The “Facebook Nevers”
The fall of Facebook has nothing to do with people quitting the service…
What is Debian all about, really? Or: friction, packaging complex applications
This weekend, those interested in Debian development have been having a discussion on the debian-devel mailing list about "What can Debian do to provide complex applications to its users?". I'm commenting on that in my blog rather than the mailing list, since this got a bit too long to be usefully done in an email.
The hidden cost of QUIC and TOU (2016)
Some new proposed protocols will encrypt the transport layer headers. Encryption is good, so more encryption must be better, right? Unfortunately there's going to be a huge hidden cost that'll be paid by anyone troubleshooting networking problems.
Git submodules revisited
Possibly not as horrible as I'd thought
On null
I've had an interesting conversation on the topic of null over the last few days, spurred by the logical disaster of null. I disagreed with the statement in the post that: Logically-speaking, there is no such thing as Null This is true in some logics, but not in all logics. Boolean logic as described in...
Undershoot: Parsing theory in 1965
Jeffrey Kegler's blog about Marpa, his new parsing algorithm, and other topics of interest
Neanderthal vs. ND4J – Native Performance, Java and CPU
Today, Java has a choice of a few well maintained libraries that can use Intel's MKL for fast native operations. MKL is basically as fast as you can get toda...
Get specific (2008)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Life lessons from differential equations (2015)
Some problems simply have no solution. Some problems have no simple solution. Some problems have many solutions. ...
Text Matching Using Cosine Similarity
Recently I was working on a project where I have to cluster all the words which have a similar name. For a novice it looks a pretty simple job of using some Fuzzy string matching tools and get this done. However in reality this was a challenge because of multiple reasons starting from pre-processing of the data to…