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How to Pay Programmers Less (2016)
Programmers are expensive and difficult to control; here are a few tricks to keep them underpaid and happy, for a while.
1562
A Million Digits of Pi in 9 Lines of JavaScript
"Big integers" have landed in Javascript, at least in Firefox and Chrome. One of my favorite things to do with high precision arithmetic is to calculate digits of π. From scratch, that is, using only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
1563
Notes on Type Layouts and ABIs in Rust
Over the years I’ve found myself with a weird amount of knowledge about how types and ABIs in Rust work, and I wanted to write it all down in one place so that… it’s written down in one place. Much of this information can or should be found in the Rust Language Reference and the Rustonomicon .
1564
My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
Harris Kenny, founder of OutboundSync. A little ode to a computing journey.
1565
From Google Analytics to Fathom
tl;dr: I'm now using Fathom for my personal website analytics, and it's easy to self-host and maintain, better for privacy, and can lead to better site performance. Since the mid-2000s, right after it became available, I started using Google Analytics for almost every website I built (whether it be mine or someone…
1566
New chips for machine intelligence
This note summarises details of some of the new silicon chips for machine intelligence. Its aim is to distil the most important implementation and architectural details (at least those that are currently available), to highlight the main differences between them. I’m focusing on chips designed for training since they…
1567
Low-quality sleep can lead to procrastination
New research that was recently published in Frontiers in Psychology provides important insights regarding the connection between sleep quality and the tendency to procrastinate .
1568
Crafting Interpreters: Calls and Functions
Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection. Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.
1569
So You Want to Be a Penetration Tester?
This is an old and outdated version of the blog. If you haven’t read this post yet, then please see the new one for the most up-to-date content: “So You Want To Work in Cyber Security?”. This version is kept here for archival purposes only.
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Building a home NAS on a shoestring budget with the Rock64 SBC (2018)
I’ve gone through many iterations of a Home NAS over the years. It started with an AMD Phenom based system running in a Norco case with about 8 hard SATA hard drives (4 primary, 4 backup via Rsync). The noise and power consumption of that system was overkill for what it was used for, so I sold it and went to a…
1572
Tracking Blood Sugar
Fasting glucose and A1C tests done over the past few years show me at low risk for diabetes. But these tests don’t necessarily capture how much blood sugar “spikes” after meals–something that may be a better predictor of disease risk . Such blood sugar spikes can be minimized with a suitable diet, but what that diet…
1573
Using Web Technologies to Print a Book
From Markdown to PDF via HTML and CSS.
1574
Stripped-down Kubernetes on the Raspberry Pi
Join me as I test-drive the smallest ever Kubernetes distribution k3s. Find out how this runs on Raspberry Pi compared to kubeadm with Docker.
1575
Everything You Should Know About Sound (2016)
We all know what sound is. Except actually, no we don't. Let's fix that.
1576
Making a Menger sponge in stained glass
Over the course of six weeks in January and February 2019, I took an introduction to stained glass course from Olivia Vavroch at Vavroch Glass Studio in north Portland, OR.
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1578
The 80/24 Rule
Write small blocks of code. How small? Here's how small.
1579
FreeBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad
Compatibility of FreeBSD on a Lenovo Thinkpad T480, notes and fixes (HiDPI, Trackpad, camera, etc).
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Simple Does Not Mean Ugly
Hi, my name is Adam Ramirez. I am a UX Designer who focuses on Design Facilitation and Product Analytics with 10 years of experience under my belt. In the past 5 years, I have been working to deliver the best possible user experience to my clients and their users.
1582
UTF-8 String Indexing Strategies
When designing or, in some cases, implementing a programming language with built-in support for Unicode strings, an important decision must be made about how to represent or encode those strings in memory. Not all representations are equal, and there are trade-offs between different choices.
1583
It’s Time for a Modern Synthesis Kernel
I had a student (Fred Smith) who worked on extensions to Popcorn (the predecessor to Cyclone) that supported run-time code generation in a lightweight fashion. Here’s a paper describing part of the system: https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/5812 . Fred’s thesis had a bunch more.
1584
Personal Kanban 101
Despite our best intentions, life has a way of becoming complicated. People, tasks, responsibilities, deadlines, and even recreation all compete for our attention. The human brain however, simply does not respond well to the stress of juggling multiple priorities. That’s where Personal Kanban can help.
1585
Some things that might help you make better software (2016)
Assuming you're in the unusual position of actually having budget for quality, here's what to spend it on.
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RISC-V from scratch 2: Hardware layouts, linker scripts, and C runtimes
A post describing how C programs get to the main function. Devicetree layouts, linker scripts, minimal C runtimes, GDB and QEMU, basic RISC-V assembly, and other topics are reviewed along the way.
1589
Neural ODE's: Understanding how they model data
In this blogpost I explore how ODE’s can be used to solve data modelling problems. I take a deep dive into the data modelling problem at hand and present ODE...
1590
ML from Scratch, Part 2: Logistic Regression (2018)
In this second installment of the machine learning from scratch we switch the point of view from regression to classification: instead of estimating a number, we will be trying to guess which of 2 possible classes a given input belongs to. A modern example is looking at a photo and deciding if its a cat or a dog.