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How I make graphics for retro systems and retro-styled games
Game consoles, especially older ones, are defined more than anything by their graphics capability. The unique graphical limitations of a system can often mak...
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Rust on MIPS64 Windows NT 4.0
Introduction
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Game theory as an engine for large-scale data analysis
Modern AI systems approach tasks like recognising objects in images and predicting the 3D structure of proteins as a diligent student would prepare for an exam. By training on many example problems, they minimise their mistakes over time until they achieve success. But this is a solitary endeavour and only one of the…
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Lua: Good, Bad, and Ugly Parts (2012)
I have been programming in Lua for about 9 months and it seemed like a good time to pause and reflect on my experience with it. I have used various languages over the years -- Perl ( soaplite.com and other projects, including my current consulting work), C ( a DHCP /DNS server for Arduino and a ping-pong juggling…
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Nuclear radiation used to transmit digital data wirelessly
Engineers have successfully transferred digitally encoded information wirelessly using nuclear radiation instead of conventional technology.
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Relational databases aren’t dinosaurs, they’re sharks
Oh relational databases, that tired old relic of another age. Codd and friends were great in their time, but serious software engineers need to move on. People building Web Scale™ software You’ve probably heard a similar sentiment at some point. That relational databases were great, but they are dinosaurs that are…
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Product-focused and sales-focused companies
Every company has a focus, and for most it's either sales or product. Here's why both are the wrong focal points
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Saying Good Bye to Hey.com
I have decided to switch away from the Hey.com email service by Basecamp. I started using it because I wanted a good independent provider that was not from Google, and I’ve been trying out se…
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What we learned doing Fast Grants
We launched an abnormally fast source of emergency science funding during COVID-19. The results revealed flaws in current science funding models.
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Is Microsoft Stealing People’s Bookmarks?
I received email from two people who told me that Microsoft Edge enabled synching without warning or consent, which means that Microsoft sucked up all of their bookmarks. Of course they can turn synching off, but it’s too late. Has this happened to anyone else, or was this user error of some sort? If this is real, can…
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Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 4: how algorithms are implemented
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses two custom digital chips to generate sou...
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For First Time, Half of Americans Favor Defending Taiwan If China Invades
2021 Chicago Council Survey data show a majority of Americans support a range of US policies towards Taiwan: recognition as an independent country, inclusion in international organizations, and a US-Taiwan free trade agreement.
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Web3 Is Not Decentralization
It's just not. Here's a deep dive into why, exactly, I think that.
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When Orcs Were Real
The Ancient Struggle for Homo Sapiens to Rule the Earth
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Making $100k as an Employee versus Being Self-Employed
<p>I’ve been self-employed for 2 years now. I love it and want to encourage others to go for it, but first, I need to answer a question as f...
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Coding with Character
Monospaced fonts are no longer just utilitarian tools—they can also be playful & fun
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A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit
In the 1980s and 1990s a common piece of advice for people working in the professional managerial class was to ‘dress for the job you want, not for the job you have.’ Throughout these decades, folks dressed aspirationally—a culture of power suits and padded shoulders.
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An Epidemic of Wage Theft Is Costing Workers Hundreds of Millions a Year (2014)
Millions of Americans struggle to get by on low wages, often without any benefits such as paid sick leave, a pension, or even health insurance. Their difficult lives are made immeasurably harder when they do the work they have been hired to do, but their employers refuse to pay, pay for some hours but not…
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When static makes your C code 10 times faster
Addendum : Many Hacker News commenters correctly point out that the right way to indicate to the compiler that a value does not change is const . This post is not about C best practices, but just about how one can easily get to the bottom of this kind of surprising behavior by looking at the compiler output. This…
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What I Learnt Becoming a Tech Lead
No, you will not write as much code as you think.
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My Python testing style guide (2017)
This post is an attempt to catalog some of my practices around testing Python projects. It's not meant to be treated as dogma- I anticipate I'll update this significantly over time.
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Machine learning saves us $1.7M a year on document previews
Recently, we translated the predictive power of machine learning (ML) into $1.7 million a year in infrastructure cost savings by optimizing how Dropbox generates and caches document previews. Machine learning at Dropbox already powers commonly-used features such as search , file and folder suggestions , and OCR in…
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Your product is a joke: lessons from improv to build better product
The rules that help make good improv comedy can surprisingly help make good product too. Let's run through interesting parallels between the two, and how you can apply some lessons from improv to build better product.
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New PostgreSQL Interface for Cloud Spanner
Start building on Google Cloud with $300 in free credits and 20+ always free products.