I recently read Turing’s Cathedral, a book about the early history of computers, and it largely focused on the life and brilliant times of John von Neumann, who was, to put it simply, a genius. It is both fascinating and disappointing to learn about a brain that works so much better than your own. Fascinating because…
PostHog has pivoted a lot . After 5 pivots in 6 months, we got into Y Combinator last year, pivoted again whilst we were there and have now gone…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021127 points32 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the fifth and final part (I, II, III, IV) of our series asking the question ‘Who were the Romans?’ How did they understand themselves as a people and the idea of ‘Roman’ as an i…
Posted by Tim Blakely, Software Engineer and Michał Januszewski, Research Scientist, Connectomics at Google In January 2020 we released the fly “he...
Retrospect of what happened in Deno in 2020
Dynamic, functional programming languages like Clojure are sometimes considered “slower” than their statically-typed and/or OO counterparts, due to facilities like dynamic function disp…
In my experience, most professional software engineers in industry have little to no experience doing competitive analysis. That’s a shame, because competitive analysis is one of the most useful skills that an engineer can have.
What are the pros and cons of using Rust for production applications? Find out in our interview with Benjamin Chastanier, a senior software engineer at Qovery.
The NTIA has requested suggestions for a challenge to accelerate development of the open 5G stack ecosystem. GitHub's submission emphasizes open source best practices.
2020 has been a weird year, for everyone around the world. In my specific case, that meant being away from my home in Shanghai, as we were in Europe at the time Covid hit and China did not make it easy to return until somewhere towards the end of the year.
Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.
Or, “how not to GIS”.
Somehow I am organizing a conference called Have you tried rubbing a database on it?
With the unprecedented advances of modern machine learning comes the tantalizing possibility of smart data-driven autonomous systems across a broad range of real-world settings. However, is machine learning (especially deep learning) really ready to be deployed in safety-critical systems?
On March 15th, 2021, Cloudflare was sued by a patent troll called Sable Networks. Today, we are launching our efforts to fight back.
Learn about the Log4j vulnerability and how you can combat it. Read this comprehensive guide to get actionable tips.
The ubiquitous IEEE floating-point standard defines two numbers to represent zero, the positive and the negative zeros. You also have the positive and negative infinity. If you compute the inverse of the positive zero, you get the positive infinity. If you compute the inverse of the negative zero, you get the negative…
I’ve been reading John Ousterhout’s A Philosophy of Software Design . At one point in the book, he gives this advice about code comments: Unfortunately, many…
Over the summer, the Los Angeles City Council Public Safety Committee approved a proposal to expand Fire District 1, an anachronistic planning overlay that would effectively ban wood-frame construction in much of the city. Superficially premised as a measure to improve fire safety, the motion has been heavily promoted…
Are there early indicators that could help predict which individuals will go on to develop this serious mental illness? New research by Distinguished Professor Mark F. Lenzenweger could point the way.
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Blockchains for everything Decentralized storage services such as Filecoin and StorJ seek to disrupt the data-storage industry, using blockchain tokens to create a competitive marketplace that can …
Dockerfiles are de facto standard for creating container images. In this article I highlight some issues with this approach and I propose building container images with Nix.
Excel has new LAMBDA functions
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.2 "Nakatomi Socrates", the second update of the NetBSD 9 release branch.
Most of us learn how to write technical articles by osmosis. After reading a hundred or so papers, we unconsciously pick up the common patterns of the field and begin to imitate them. This phenomenon is largely beneficial, but there are several truly odious habits that are almost universally and inadvertently adopted…
