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This oh so this. If you look back over the decades at the many high-level complaints that have been leveled at Windows, one in particular sticks out: Unlike Mac OS, in particular, Windows has always attempted to satisfy every possible customer need, and as such it often provides multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. The result is a messy product, if you will, one that lacks the singular vision that is typically associated with the..
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demand-progress: The NSA “is gathering nearly 5 billion records...
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yieldthought.com
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12 years ago
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eng
demand-progress : The NSA “is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world.” ( Washington Post ) Join us in protesting the National Security Agency’s wide-ranging invasion of privacy. Take action → This is not really just about the NSA; our whole system of government and national competition is set up to make pressure towards mass surveillance irresistible to many parties. ..
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I had an experience the other day that transformed my thoughts on interfaces and I’d like to share it. I believe that not enough of us understand what an interface really is and that this is hampering our ability to provide good user experience. One of the problems we have when answering the question “What is an interface?” is that we don’t have an accurate representation of what an interface looks like. There is a tendency for us to beco....
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One of the podcasts I listen to these days is Modules Unraveled by Brian Lewis. The most recent episode was a conversation with Théodore Biadala, who is the…
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Just a quick post to show off the new searchcode.com logo. I have been working on a new version of the site for a few weeks now and want to get something out there for people to look at. Design wise its not done yet, but the logo is. There it is in all its glory. The new design has a similar look and I should be able to start talking about and showing it off soon. Things I can mention are,
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This is my third teardown of Ingress: 1.45.1. To get an understanding of how this works, I'd recommend looking over my first and second teardown of this game for more information. With that, here is my 3rd teardown of Ingress Fonts for Glphys It
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Finding solutions to systems of polynomial equations is one of the oldest and deepest problems in all of mathematics. This is broadly the domain of algebraic geometry, and mathematicians wield some of the most sophisticated and abstract tools available to attack these problems. The elliptic curve straddles the elementary and advanced mathematical worlds in an interesting way. On one hand, it’s easy to describe in elementary terms: it’s the ..
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Finding solutions to systems of polynomial equations is one of the oldest and deepest problems in all of mathematics. This is broadly the domain of algebraic geometry, and mathematicians wield some of the most sophisticated and abstract tools available to attack these problems. The elliptic curve straddles the elementary and advanced mathematical worlds in an interesting way. On one hand, it’s easy to describe in elementary terms: it’s the ..
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Finding solutions to systems of polynomial equations is one of the oldest and deepest problems in all of mathematics. This is broadly the domain of algebraic geometry, and mathematicians wield some of the most sophisticated and abstract tools available to attack these problems. The elliptic curve straddles the elementary and advanced mathematical worlds in an interesting way. On one hand, it’s easy to describe in elementary terms: it’s the ..
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Great look at the industry’s leading font providers, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Typekit, and Google Fonts, made all the more valuable because now I won’t have to shell out $150 to ultimately go back to Google Fonts in the end. In a sense, as light bulbs are to Marco Arment, so too are fonts to The Typist in this article. Also worth noting with regards to Google’s offering is that in addition to making an ever-expanding library of fonts availabl..
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An Improved Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs
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daringfireball.net
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12 years ago
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eng
Last week John Gruber updated his regular expression for matching URLs from a relatively modest 205 characters to just shy of two thousand. Given that I wrote my own Markdown parser for this site and thus spent quite a bit of time crafting regular expressions myself, his article immediately piqued my interest. Unlike John though, who wrote his to actually match URLs, mine assumes that everything formatted as a Markdown link is, in fact, a l..
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Interesting article from Benedict Evans drawing parallels between the dynamics of today’s smartphone industry where device manufacturers have no idea what the next five years could hold for the platform they base their entire business upon, Android, and the days of WinTel’s dominance we are only just now beginning to see the decline of, where OEMs had concrete road maps upon which to build future devices to. This lack of stability could hav..
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Don’t just complain that tech podcasts are boring, create your own tech podcast that you don’t find boring. Don’t just complain that most blogs are posting such boring echo chamber posts, post more interesting posts that explore new topics. That is what the great visionaries in history have done, fought the boredom and let it push them into areas that they didn’t find boring. That’s creativity, pushing the boundaries of what came before and....
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There's always a first time and this was it. The first assignment as a gainfully employed web developer. We all need to crawl before we can walk.
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This is a guest post by my friend and colleague Adam Lelkes. Adam’s interests are in algebra and theoretical computer science. This gem came up because Adam gave a talk on probabilistic computation in which he discussed this technique. Problem: Simulate a fair coin given only access to a biased coin. Solution: (in Python) def fairCoin(biasedCoin): coin1, coin2 = 0,0 while coin1 == coin2: coin1, coin2 = biasedCoin(), biasedCoin() return coin..
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This is a guest post by my friend and colleague Adam Lelkes. Adam’s interests are in algebra and theoretical computer science. This gem came up because Adam gave a talk on probabilistic computation in which he discussed this technique. Problem: Simulate a fair coin given only access to a biased coin. Solution: (in Python) def fairCoin(biasedCoin): coin1, coin2 = 0,0 while coin1 == coin2: coin1, coin2 = biasedCoin(), biasedCoin() return coin..
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This is a guest post by my friend and colleague Adam Lelkes. Adam’s interests are in algebra and theoretical computer science. This gem came up because Adam gave a talk on probabilistic computation in which he discussed this technique. Problem: Simulate a fair coin given only access to a biased coin. Solution: (in Python) def fairCoin(biasedCoin): coin1, coin2 = 0,0 while coin1 == coin2: coin1, coin2 = biasedCoin(), biasedCoin() return coin..
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We went for a walk today and decided to go in the opposite direction than we usually take. We ended up in a suburb I think called Kärrtorp. The walk wasn’t very long, but certainly interesting! The weather was wet and gloomy, the path was more icy than expected, and we walked across a creepy-ass building. So yeah…this post is pretty much about the building.
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With all the recent revelations of government spying and backdoors into cryptographic standards, I am starting to disagree with the argument that you should never roll your own cryptography. Of course there are massive pitfalls and very few people actually need home-brewed cryptography, but history has made it clear that blindly accepting the word of the experts is not an acceptable course of action. What we really need is more understandin..
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With all the recent revelations of government spying and backdoors into cryptographic standards, I am starting to disagree with the argument that you should never roll your own cryptography. Of course there are massive pitfalls and very few people actually need home-brewed cryptography, but history has made it clear that blindly accepting the word of the experts is not an acceptable course of action. What we really need is more understandin..
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With all the recent revelations of government spying and backdoors into cryptographic standards, I am starting to disagree with the argument that you should never roll your own cryptography. Of course there are massive pitfalls and very few people actually need home-brewed cryptography, but history has made it clear that blindly accepting the word of the experts is not an acceptable course of action. What we really need is more understandin..
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Patrick Rhone shares some great insights into writing after a lifetime spent with the craft. Not just on writing though, but about blogging, setting expectations, and attaining success as well. A great read. Permalink.
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Decidability of finding the fastest Turing machine to compute a function with a finite domain
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www.forwardscattering.org
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12 years ago
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eng
Let's say we have some (total) function \(f\), defined on some finite domain \(A\): $$ f : A \mapsto B $$ For example, f might be a square function defined on \( \{1, 2, 3, 4\} \): Input Output 1 1 2 4 3 9 4 16 The question now arises, is it possible to define an effective procedure that will determine the fastest Turing machine that computes the function \(f\). Without any limitations on the Turing machine, we can simply construct....
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The worst program I ever worked on was something I was asked to maintain once. It consisted of two parts. The first was a web application writen in ASP. The second portion was essentially Microsoft Reporting Services implemented in 80,000 lines of VB.NET. The first thing I did was chuck it into VS2010 and run some code metrics on it. The results were, 10 or so Methods had 2000+ lines of code. The maintainability index was 0 (number betwee....
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You get two default build configurations: Debug and Release, when creating a new project in Visual Studio. And it’s enough for most small projects. But there can appear a necessity to extend it with the additional configurations. It’s ok if you need to add just a couple of new settings, but what if there are tens of such settings? And what if your solution contains 20 projects that need setting up of these configurations? In this case it be..
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You get two default build configurations: Debug and Release, when creating a new project in Visual Studio. And it’s enough for most small projects. But there can appear a necessity to extend it with the additional configurations. It’s ok if you need to add just a couple of new settings, but what if there are tens of such settings? And what if your solution contains 20 projects that need setting up of these configurations? In this case it be..
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In a conversation with @alexbaldwin yesterday the topic of email came up, with each of us quickly diving into various observations, how its both awesome and a great form of communication/engagement, how most people still do it really bad. Alex has some good experience with it with hack design having over 100,000 subscribers. A tangent in an entirely unrelated meeting with @mschoening and others it was suggested instead of emailing a lis....
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In a conversation with @alexbaldwin yesterday the topic of email came up, with each of us quickly diving into various observations, how its both awesome and a great form of communication/engagement, how most people still do it really bad. Alex has some good experience with it with hack design having over 100,000 subscribers. A tangent in an entirely unrelated meeting with @mschoening and others it was suggested instead of emailing a lis....
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Great piece from Ben Thompson on Satya Nadella’s recent ascension to power over at Microsoft. Although I have not followed this saga closely — a fancy way of saying that I just don’t care — I found Ben’s thoughts on the topic, as usual, very interesting. Perhaps one day we will look back on this day as the turning point after which Microsoft started an upwards trend of relevance, profitability, and innovation. Perhaps, but I’m not getting m..
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Stefan Constantinescu has some very interesting ideas regarding Apple’s future plans for its mobile phone line with the launch of the iPhone 6 this fall. I wrote about my thoughts on the topic a couple weeks ago, but the possibility of an iPhone 6C built according to the new form factor of the 6 with 5S internals did not occur to me. Very interesting, both this idea and his reasoning behind the imminence of a larger iPhone, and his justif..
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A few days ago I wrote Algorithmic Ineptitude , where I took Hacker News, Digg, and Reddit to task for recommending articles based on flawed algorithms rather than employing humans to perform the same task in a much better way. That same day I found a post by Alex Turnbull of Groove talking about his team’s efforts to game Hacker News. Although his well-researched, reasonable methodology ultimately failed, its existence highlights a huge..
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Right on the heels of its quarterly earnings call, after an 8% drop in price, Apple shelled out $14,000,000,000 in continuation the buyback program it started in 2012 . Contrary to 9to5mac’s report, I have a hard time believing Tim Cook was at all surprised by this drop; rather, a much more likely scenario would have found him counting on such a devaluation regardless of what he said, did, or otherwise announced during the earnings call. W..
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I’ve seen some great critiques of TED in the past, but I really enjoyed Charlie Hoehn’s talk from 2011 on free work — essentially, what amounted to “do what you love on nights and weekends until it becomes a viable business, then take it full-time.” There is quite a bit more nuance to Charlie’s approach though, so I strongly encourage you to check his video out. It’s a bit long, but — as he said in closing — what do you have to lose? P..
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This blog post is dedicated to my colleague Seminda who has been experimenting with how to create simple and powerful web applications. Thank you for showing me your ideas and discussing improvements with me, Seminda. I find many C# applications have much unnecessary code. This is especially true as the weight of the business logic of many applications are shifting from the backend to JavaScript code in the web pages. When the job of your a..
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This is something that took me 2 years or so to learn. One day I realised nobody was really looking at my timecards in depth so I started allocating extra time to things and using the extra time to fix the things I thought needed fixing. Once I started delivering on this I showed my manager who agreed that it was a good use of time. I was given free reign to fix anything I felt would add maximum value, provided the bug fixes continued to be..
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If you are using Python and the awesome Boto library to access Amazon S3, make sure you don’t miss How to Save 90% on Your S3 Bill .
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The reality is that AngularJS is winning the frontend framework war. It’s not to say there aren’t great, high quality alternatives out there, but few have gained so much developer mindshare that slow and conservative companies see it as a wonderful investment. And it’s all the better that normal developers actually love developing with it! via Why AngularJS Will Be Huge .
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Each person has multiple talents but only gets to develop few of them in their lifetime, based on the environment and the situation they are in. For example, I bet there were many people in the past who would have been great programmers, but since computers didn’t exist, and the theory wasn’t developed, they never got to see how good they were. Some of them possessed a mind that would come up with genius ideas in computer science, but inste....
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I removed social media buttons from my site in 2014 after noticing they got near-zero clicks. Here's what I learned—and why the share-button era ended.
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If you are using Python and the awesome Boto library to access Amazon S3, make sure you don’t miss How to Save 90% on Your S3 Bill .
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