I have written this post for developers in the Common Lisp community who asked why I am switching to Julia. It may only be relevant for the small set of people who use Common Lisp for scientific computing.
I've released my new iOS app, Vignette.
It is not surprising that the news about Automattic buying Tumblr has picked up a lot of coverage. I especially appreciated the notes of support from Tumblr founder David Karp, former CTO Marco Arm…
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I speak very fast. It’s like the words are piled up in my mouth and I can’t say one without the rest tumbling out. Through my whole life people have told me to slow down, speak more clearly, and enunciate. I can do it if I concentrate but I quickly relapse into gushing out words. As I now give lots of conference…
How I make it work (or not)
I wrote a couple of years ago about the troubles I had finding a good libc for embedded systems , and for the last year or so I've been using something I called 'newlib-nano', which was newlib with the stdio from avrlibc bolted on. That library has worked pretty well, and required very little work to ship.
There is a just-so story that explains the existence of money. Before money, the story goes, we all had to barter for the goods we wanted. If I wanted wheat and had chickens, I needed to find someone who wanted chickens and had extra wheat. Money solves this “double coincidence” problem by letting me sell my chickens…
Interactive article explaining alpha compositing concepts.
This post shows how to process gigabytes of unstructured data with the Spark framework and using the R language.
Someone at work asked about this trip report I wrote long ago. I had not realized it was ever seen outside Bell Labs Research, but I now kno...
RiakAround 2013, Riak was at the forefront of Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) development with the engineers at Basho Technologies working hard to integrate efficient, usable CRDTs from t...
Over the last few years the number of people and businesses online has ballooned.
I’ve been playing a lot of Enter The Gungeon recently. It’s a great, brutally hard, twin stick bullet hell that reminded me a lot of Binding of Isaac. But as I’ve been playing it …
Back when Internet Explorer was dominant, and every developer I knew installed Firefox on every family member and their dogs desktop, I remember a big selling point for convincing people to use Firefox was ‘Tabs’.
Snippets 2, Episode 22
You ever notice that there's this funny threshold for getting to the front page on sites like HN? The exact threshold varies depending on how much traffic there is, but, for articles that aren't wildly popular, there's this moment when the article is at N-1 votes. There is, perhaps, a 60% chance that the vote will…
Back before I first left the United States in 2012, I’d often use price comparison websites when trying to find parts for computers and system builds...
Fukushima 8 years on
In my previous post, I reviewed a new fast random number generator called wyhash. I commented that I expected it to do well on x64 processors (Intel and AMD), but not so well on ARM processors. Let us review again wyhash: uint64_t wyhash64_x; uint64_t wyhash64() { wyhash64_x += 0x60bee2bee120fc15; __uint128_t tmp; tmp…
Trying to design a new programming language, I’m faced with the question of how to implement a parser for it. Various parser generators are available and sup...
As previously discussed on this blog, Intel decided to quit the desktop board business in 2013. What has not been discussed is how Intel treated the buyers of the last generation (i.e. 8-series Lynx Point chipsets) of those boards. Since I have now acquired two of those boards, DZ87KLT-75K and DQ87PG, I had an…
What explains the popularity of terminals with 80×24 and 80×25 displays? A recent blog post " 80x25 " motivated me to investigate this. The ...
Understanding how the academic community understands software adoption.
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of Murray Gell-Mann, leader in particle physics and Nobel Prize winner. Observations from years together in Caltech’s physics department and a selection of Gell-Mann’s contributions to physics.
A series of how to examples on using jq, a command-line JSON processor
Gwern has answered my prayers and taught GPT-2 poetry. GPT-2 is the language processing system that OpenAI announced a few weeks ago. They are keeping the full version secret, but have released a s…
