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Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms
I have attended several Tech events where they invite so-called gurus and experts to explain the digital landscape in Africa, but I have…
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A legend reborn: Microsoft brings back the iconic Classic IntelliMouse
Microsoft IntelliMouse. Originally launched in 1996, it became instantly famous with gamers and highly regarded as a great gaming mouse. The IntelliMouse 3.0 had exceptional ergonomics due to its the asymmetric from, and sculpted buttons and finger rests, making it fit perfectly into your hand. It also used long life…
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The Slide Rule
At the turn of the 16th century, Johannes Kepler set out to disprove Copernicus, who believed planets orbited in perfect, concentric circles from the sun. Kepler first formulated his hypothesis: planets had elliptical orbits with two foci, and then set out to prove it mathematically. 4 years and 900 pages of…
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No Paper Is That Good
Last year, Noah Smith proposed his Two Paper Rule: If you want me to read the vast literature, cite me two papers that are exemplars and paragons of that literature. Foundational papers, key recent innovations – whatever you like (but no review papers or summaries). Just two. I will read them. If these two papers […]
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Faster R with FastR
R is a programming language for statistical computing known for its rich ecosystem of 3rd party libraries called “packages”. The R…
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Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
In 2013, I had the idea of making a newsgroup search engine. All I had to do was download all newsgroup postings and index them. Well I wro...
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When There’s an Audience, People’s Performance Improves
Follow the Johns Hopkins Medicine newsroom for the latest updates in medicine, scientific discovery, and next generation medical education, expert sources, and media contact information.
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Oops, I Wrote a C++ Compiler
TL;DR I wrote a .NET library that can compile C/C++ code into a byte code that it can also interpret. It is used in my app iCircuit to simulate Arduinos. You can use it yourself with the nuget package CLanguage.
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Clive OS: Go applications that can run without an operating system (2016)
Removing (most of) the software stack from the cloud Clive is an operating system designed to work in distributed and cloud computing environments. It’s main design guidelines are: Ther…
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HTTPS in the real world
In cryptography, trust is mathematically provable. Everything else is just faith.
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However improbable: The story of a processor bug
Processor problems have been in the news lately, due to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. But generally, engineers writing software assume that computer hardware operates in a reliable, well-understood fashion, and that any problems lie on the software side of the software-hardware divide.
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Postgres indexes under the hood
Many software engineers use database indexes every day, but few of us really understand how they work. In this post I’ll explain: How indexing works in Postgres using B-Trees What B-Trees are Why they are a good fit for this problem Indexes in Postgres Postgres actually offers 4 different kinds of indexes for…
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Reasoning with Types in Rust
Hi, I'm Ariel (she/her), a newly-minted member of the Swift team at Apple ! Previously, I helped lead the Luau team at Roblox where my efforts primarily focused on the design and implementation of Luau 's type system. I also led the creation of Lute to support using Luau both to build developer tooling, and as a…
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MINERVA-II1: Successful image capture, landing on Ryugu and hop
MINERVA-II1: Successful image capture, landing on Ryugu and hop!
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Can functional programming be liberated from the von Neumann paradigm? (2010)
Inspirations & experiments, mainly about denotative/functional programming in Haskell
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Microsoft Buys GitHub: The Linux Foundation's Reaction
‘In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnanimity, In Peace: Good Will.’ Winston S. Churchill This week Microsoft announced that it is purchasing GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. I waited for a few days to write up my thoughts because this is something that deserves some thoughtful reflection. The…
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Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
Dropbear is a small and lightweight SSH server and client that can replace OpenSSH on any POSIX platform such as GNU / Linux, * BSD, Cygwin … Dropbear is free software since it is released under MIT-style licenses.
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CSS: The bad bits and how to avoid them
The more I use CSS, the more I think it’s an absolute wild wild west. It’s mature, ubiquitous, yet lacks basic, common-sense features that come as a given in other similar tools
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WebAssembly doesn’t make unsafe languages safe
WebAssembly is all the rage these days. And for good reasons. It’s pretty exciting to see many compiled languages adopting a common intermediate represe...
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Never patterns, exhaustive matching, and uninhabited types in Rust
One of the long-standing issues that we’ve been wrestling with in Rust is how to integrate the concept of an “uninhabited type” – that is, a type which has no values at all. Uninhabited types are useful to represent the “result” of some computation you know will never execute – for example, if you have to define an…
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Asterix in Translation: The Genius of Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge
As promised in a previous blog entry, what follows is a discussion of the translation of some of my favourite Asterix gags. The translators’ modus operandi was to include as many jokes in the Engli…
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