How bad can it git? Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories Meli et al., NDSS’19 On the one hand you might say there’s no new news here. We know that developers shouldn’t …
Neural networks involve long sequence of multiplications, usually between a matrix and a vector, say \(a*x\). The result of this sequence of multiplications will either have a huge magnitude or be reduced to 0. We can divide \(a\) by a number ( scaling_factor ) to scale down its magnitude to the right level. Proper…
Serverless computing: one step forward, two steps back Hellerstein et al., CIDR’19 The biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research has come round again. Today’s paper choice is su…
CSS Grid is fun to use but hard to learn. Here are three tips to help you understand and leverage the Grid spec.
Hi, people of the future! Did you know that I wrote a follow-up article to this one, called “Further Thoughts on Wayland”? This original article was written in a more combative tone tha…
Software security must be addressed by all programmers, not just security experts. So we teach it in CS 330, a programming (languages) class.
In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just…
If you're a programmer who's become fed up with software bloat, then may you find herein the perfect antidote.
Apple’s talk about services got specific with a bunch of news subscription services. Most of them are sensible and worthy iteration, but the company still hasn’t explained exactly what it plans with its push into commissioning billions of dollars of premium TV (Spielberg! Oprah!). Maybe all of this
From Medieval sword-fighters to Broca’s brains, or why the hand may hold the key to the link between creativity and mental illness.
This is a comparison of PostgreSQL DBaaS providers with an interactive calculator.
Back in 2015, Brian Will wrote a provocative blog post: Object-Oriented Programming: A Disaster Story . He followed it up with a video called Object-Oriented Programming is Bad , which is much more detailed. I recommend taking the time to watch the video, but here’s my one-paragraph summary:
One day in early June of 1992, a group of executives from Electronic Arts visited Origin Systems’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. If they had come from any other company, the rank and file at Origin might not have paid them much attention. As it was, though, the visit felt a bit like Saddam Hussein dropping in at…
As WebGPU specification is approaching a usable shape, we are working on prototype implementations in both Gecko and Servo. If you ever wondered about what i...
I’ve recently been tinkering around with using a Raspberry Pi as a desktop computer. The Pi 4 is fairly powerful; very sufficient for web browsing, audio, video, and terminal use for programming.
Let's take a quick look at what compile-time execution looks like in Zig.
Excessive instruction cache misses are the kind of a performance problem that's going to appear only in larger codebases. In this article, I'm describing some ideas on how to deal with this issue.
Jacob Collier is the internet’s favorite musical virtuoso. Here’s his mostly acapella arrangement of a Christmas carol called “In The Bleak Midwinter.” The most remarkable p…
Exactly 100% of everything on the Internet involves exchanging messages which represent items of interest to humans. These items can be classified into three baskets: One for “media” (images, sound, video), one for text (HTML, PDF, XML), and one for “objects” (chat messages, payments, love poems, order statuses). This…
Distributed consensus revised Howard, PhD thesis Welcome back to a new term of The Morning Paper! To kick things off, I’m going to start by taking a look at Dr Howard’s PhD thesis, ‘Distributed con…
Today, I'm publishing a new book: Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir . It's my third book, the second one that is not self-published.
Exercise in pointing out the obvious: Greenland has been, is, and will be indefinitely, a white elephant. Denmark turned down 100m USD from the USA in 1946; I discuss how this was a bad idea—America got what it needed anyway while Denmark kept control of a loser.
I like to brew my coffee by hand.
Hi Everyone. Happy 2019. Today, as is my custom on the first day of the new year, I am going to take a stab at what the year ahead will bring. I find it useful to think about what we are in for. It helps me invest and advise the companies we are invested in. […]
