1831
1832
The Decline of the MacBook Pro
I’ve been using Macs for almost nine years. I got a 15” MacBook Pro the summer before my freshman year of college through my school’s computer store. I used it for six years before getting a 13” model in 2015. I’m considering getting a new one in the next year or two, but the latest MacBook Pros have become worse in…
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1834
The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub
I could write a lot of things about the Github acquisition by Microsoft. About Github's embrace and extend of git, and how it passed unnoticed by people who now fear the same thing now that Microsoft is in the picture. About the stultifying effects of Github's centralization, and its retardant effect on general…
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1837
Decode Like It's 1999: MPEG-1 Decoder in JavaScript
A few years ago I started to work on an MPEG1 Video decoder, completely written in JavaScript. Now, I finally found the time to clean up the library, improve its performance, make it more error resilient and modular and add an MP2 Audio decoder and MPEG-TS demuxer. This makes this library not just an MPEG decoder, but…
1838
Study finds increased possibility of information leaking around Fed meetings
Booth study finds increased possibility of information leaking around Fed meetings
1839
Money Laundering via Author Impersonation on Amazon
Patrick Reames had no idea why Amazon.com sent him a 1099 form saying he’d made almost $24,000 selling books via Createspace , the company’s on-demand publishing arm. That is, until he searched the site for his name and discovered someone has been using it to peddle a $555 book that’s full of nothing but gibberish.
1840
Are unsound type systems wrong?
This is an essay I wrote early-2016. After battling with soundness vs. usability in Typed Clojure for many years, I was starting to reconsider the “obviously wrong” approach of baking unsoundness into the type system from the get-go. I look at some historical examples of intentional unsoundness in type systems, and…
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1842
23andMe Granted FDA Authorization for Genetic Test on Cancer Risk
23andMe Granted First FDA Authorization for Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Test on Cancer Risk
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1844
Elastic TabStops: A Better Way to Indent and Align Code (2017)
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code
1845
Interviews vs. auditions
In every off-season teams in every sport begin a strange ritual. Prospective coaches are flown in to meet with management about open positions — sometimes they convene at the stadium, in nondescript conference rooms, or the cabin of the owner’s plane. Whatever the locale, the scene is usually thus: The ambitious coach…
1846
The “Run Less Software” philosophy
We have developed a critical philosophy behind how we build software, and the tech stack we rely on. We call it Run Less Software.
1847
Making Pulled Pork with React Native, Expo, and Express
I was planning to make pulled pork the next day. That evening I set up the Weber kettle, got out the bag of charcoal and some chunks of apple wood, and laid everything out. Mise en place , as they say. I’d be waking up at 7am the next morning to light it up, and I didn’t trust my sleepy self to remember everything.
1848
1849
Fast base64 encoding and decoding
Computers store data as streams of bits. Binary files like image, audio or video files are allowed to contain just about any sequence of bits. However, we also often use text formats; for example, web pages and emails are required to be text. So how do we send images by email? How do we embed … Continue reading…
1850
AI Can Detect Illnesses in Human Breath
Researchers from Loughborough University, Western General Hospital, the University of Edinburgh, and the Edinburgh Cancer Centre in the United Kingdom, recently developed a deep learning-based method…
1851
Court has confirmed coordinated raids of Zwiebelfreunde in Germany were illegal
Update July 10th: Last week Monday, prosecution stated that they will keep our things for further analysis, even after explicitly confirming to journalists that they are aware that our only connection to Riseup is the collection of donations. This includes items belonging to our partners, and other third parties like…
1852
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo explained
Understanding an effective way of sampling from complex distributions with 3d-demonstrations
1853
1854
Leaving NYC for Nashville
For ten out of the last eleven years, I’ve lived in two places: New York City and San Francisco. The last two years have been in NYC. After founding Ursa Labs , a not-for-profit open source development group, I felt it was time to make my home somewhere that isn’t either of those places. After some contemplation and…
1855
Depressing and faintly terrifying days for the C standard [pdf]
Chris Lattner, the architect of the Clang/LLVM C compiler explained the effects of the C standard’s “undefined behavior”(UB):
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Why don't I take military funding? (2004)
Mostly it's a testimony that it's possible to have a successful career in computer science without taking military funding. My position has its roots in the Vietnam War, when I was a conscientious objector, did alternative service instead of submitting to the draft, and joined the Society of Friends (Quakers). During…
1858
The future of WebAssembly – A look at upcoming features and proposals
WebAssembly is a performance optimised virtual machine that was shipped in all four major browsers earlier this year. It is a nascent technology and the current version is very much an MVP. This blog post takes a look at the WebAssembly roadmap and the features it might gain in the near future.
1859
The Apple Watch – Tipping Point Time for Healthcare
I don’t own an Apple Watch. I do have a Fitbit. But the Apple Watch 4 announcement intrigued me in a way no other product has since the original IPhone. This wasn’t just another product announcemen…
1860
But don’t let that distract you; it was designed to kill people (2017)
I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.