1. In the 1970s, the philosophers Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre published a short essay on the nature of human fallibility that I read during my surgical training and haven’t stopped...
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2019105 points18 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Today we’re going to talk about what a pre-modern battlefield might look like after the battle is over. Obvious content warning, since this post is going to talk about (and show pictures of) …
Serving the right code to the right browsers can be tricky. Here are some options.
Yellowstone National Park maintains a collection of sounds and videos taken in the park that are in the public domain and free for anyone to use. The collection
Hash tables are the most popular probabilistic data structure, by quite a margin. You compute some hash code then compute an array index from that hash code. If you’re using open addressing-c…
Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys’19 On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs enviro…
Sharing and reusing memory buffers is inescapable if we want high performance. It is a sharp but powerful tool.
I have a lengthy TODO.org of things I might eventually implement for Emacs, most of which are not exactly useful, are challenging to do or fulfill both conditions. A NES emulator fits all of these criteria neatly. I’ve kept hearing that they can run on poor hardware and learned that the graphics fit into a tiled model…
The blog of Seva Zaikov
In a recent blog post entitled “Monorepos: Please don’t,” Matt Klein discusses the pros and cons - as it turns out, mostly cons in his view - of monorepos. The long and short of it is that he thinks that they are not a good fit for most teams. After thinking about this question for a few years I have come to the…
help your EE candidates strut their stuff
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Before our kids learned to talk, I would play tickles with them. I would make tickling gestures as I moved towards them, they would start giggling a little, then I would tickle them and they would laugh. We'd continue until they seemed to be done with the game, and then we'd move on to something else. As they got…
Jony Ive is leaving Apple: how it happened, Ive’s legacy, and what it means for Apple going forward.
The idea of "statistical significance" has been a basic concept in introductory statistics courses for decades. If you spend any time lookin...
I’m not a big fan of stereotypes, but there’s no denying that a lot of leaders in tech are former engineers–a group no one would claim is known for being…
In this article we will put some light on a lot of tools used in the world of Unix desktop environment customization, particularly regarding wmctrl, wmutils, xev, xtruss, xwininfo, xprop, xdotools, xdo, sxhkd, xbindkeys, speckeysd, xchainkeys, alttab, triggerhappy, gTile, gidmgr, keynav, and more. If those don't make…
This article explores different ways to create iterators and iterable values in Javascript for dynamic sequence generation, specifically using functions, iterators, iterables and generators. It provides code examples for implementing the Fibonacci sequence with each approach.
This is a program that determines many properties of the C compiler and machine that it is run on, such as minimum and maximum [un]signed char/int/long, many properties of float/ [long] double, and so on.
A comparison of ideas behind Dynamo and Cassandra
We often have to write code using permissive programming languages like C and C++. They tend to generate hard-to-debug problems that can crash your applications. Thankfully, many compilers offer "sanitizers". I discussed them in my post No more leaks with sanitize flags in gcc and clang. I strongly encourage the use…
2018 is an exciting time to be a programmer, with so many good “full service” programming languages to choose from: C, C++ 2017, Go, Python, Rust and who knows Swift too. Programming languages are complicated beasts - even the simplest languages have specifications that run (or would run) in the hundreds of pages, and…
Mergeable replicated data types Kaki et al., OOPSLA’19 This paper was published at OOPSLA, but perhaps it’s amongst the distributed systems community that I expect there to be the greatest in…
Down a rather shabby road in a Cambridge industrial estate can be found a haven of retro computing delights - the Centre for Computing History.
Map of the cognitive science, historical from 1930 to 2020 with prehistory and future prediction. Including Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Biology and more.
