Every programming language has some fundamental idea(s) that drives its design and evolution. For Haskell that’s functional purity and state-of-the-art static typing, for Erlang that’s distributed programming and fault tolerance, for Clojure that’s simplicity and stability. What all these examples have in common is…
Autistic burnout is a state of physical and mental fatigue, heightened stress, and diminished capacity to manage life skills, sensory input, and/or social interactions, which comes from years of being severely overtaxed by the strain of trying to live up to demands that are out of sync with our needs.
Due to sheer coincidence of several unrelated tasks converging on Python at work, I recently needed to brush up on my Python skills. So far for me, Python has been little more than a fancy extension language for BeautifulSoup , though I also used it to participate in the recent tradition of writing one’s own static…
Tips I use to avoid burnout:
In 2017 the company I worked for in Toronto got acquired by Yelp. The software engineers in my company (including myself) were asked to move to San Francisco. At the end of 2017 we moved, and I spent most of 2018 there. With the year coming to an end, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on my time there.
The standard for browsing the web over a text-=based terminal is Lynx, right? ...
telegra.ph/why-openbsd-is-marginally-less-horrible-12-052019220 points127 commentsSystems & Performance details
The following document is an attempt to consolidate down a number of threads spanning separate discussions from around the 'net I have been having on the subject of operating system development models and OpenBSD. I will break up this document into several sections each of which will handle separate pillars of my…
Camera sales are continuing to falling off a cliff. The latest data from the Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA) shows them in a swoon befitting a Bollywood roadside Romeo. All four bi…
I have spent the last couple of years teaching folks about surveillance and what they can do about it, primarily in partnership with the Civil Liberties Defense Center and through a interdisciplinary course on surveillance and social movements . In reading about surveillance, I had come across, in multiple places, a…
This is an archive of the original "fsyncgate" email thread. This is posted here because I wanted to have a link that would fit on a slide for a talk on file safety with a mobile-friendly non-bloated format .
Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few d…
I discovered a Facebook bug which allows me to identify whether a visitor is logged in to a specific Facebook account. It can check hundreds of identities per second.
A good example of a simple looking, but hard to use correctly, API is one which takes two or more parameters of the same type. Let’s compare two function signatures:
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.
Things I've learned while porting 50 thousand lines of code from Java to Go
<p class="indent">People say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s take a look at the two colours in comparison (there are various shades of purple and violet, and the following
So I've been curious about what kinds of displays you can connect to the Pi-series single board computers for a while. I happened to accidentally order a few. Among others an eInk display. I ordered the PaPiRus ePaper. It ended up being dead on arrival and then out of stock so I received an Inky to replace it. Fair…
Geostationary satellites maintain their position relative to earth. This means a parabolic dish can be pointed at the satellite and receive continuous downloads.
Keeping CALM: when distributed consistency is easy Hellerstein & Alvaro, arXiv 2019 The CALM conjecture (and later theorem) was first introduced to the world in a 2010 keynote talk at PODS. Beh…
Update: Due to lack of interest/use, in June 2021 this site was shut down and user data (emails, names, search alerts) deleted from all systems and backups. For Extramaze LLC I'm using Racket in a commercial project -- a search engine with email alerts fo...
I was looking through my iPhone device analytics as I plan my iOS 13 updates and noticed something that really jumped out at me.
[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a sm…
We've been restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer 1 . Now that we have the world's only working AGC, I decided to write some code for it. Try...
