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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 the latest update to desktop builds we made the mouse wheel scroll the UI which is something that we’ve meant to do for ages but just didn’t get around to doing. This will also work in the simulator when the next update arrives. This was a big challenge to implement properly since the mouse doesn’t actually touch a specific component, eventually we decided to just send press/release/drag events in sequence when a mouse wheel is active.
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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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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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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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Think of the times you've planned to leave work and go to a restaurant, pub, or the like with a few of your colleagues. I'll use the metaphor of the after work drinks, since I'm most familiar with that one. What often happens is something like the following: Thirsty worker #1: "I'll send an email to everyone asking who wants to go to the pub after work" Thirsty workers #2 to #6 all reply that they do. Thirsty worker #7 says, "I just need to..
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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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This morning I saw a post on LinkedIn by Bob Sutton who is a Stanford Professor and Co-author of Scaling up Excellence. He discusses Adobe's move to abolish it's employee stack ranking system. After the system was eliminated, one Adobe employee noted that a feeling of relief spread throughout the company because the old annual review system was “a soul-less and soul crushing exercise.” This post A Soul Crushing Exercise first appeare..
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A few days ago my girlfriend told me about the “lunk alarm”, a gimmick Planet Fitness uses to make its facilities more attractive to those who rarely go to the gym. Marketed as a judgment-free workout zone, Planet Fitness sets this alarm off whenever a patron makes too much noise during their workout; upon repeat transgressions, the gym’s managers will ask these people to leave in order to foster a less intimidating atmosphere — or so the r..
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Why is storing, tracking and managing billions of tiny files directly on a file system a nightmare?
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boyter.org
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12 years ago
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eng
Its a real pain when you want to inspect the files, delete or copy them. Try taking 300,000 files and copy them somewhere. Then copy 1 file which has the size of the 300,000 combined. The single file is MUCH faster (its also why we usually do a tar operation before copying stuff if its already compressed). Any database that’s not a toy will usually lay the 300,000 records out in a single file (depending on settings, sizes and filesystem l..
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The idea of Full-Stack Development is quite popular at the moment — building things that run both the browser and the server side of web development, usually utilizing similar languages and frameworks. With Flow-Based Programming and the emerging Flowhub ecosystem, we can take this even further. Thanks to the FBP network protocol we can build and monitor graphs spanning multiple devices and flow-based environments. Jon Nordby ga....
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Refactoring is one of the techniques that allows us to be agile and apply an evolutionary approach to our design. A core XP practice and one of TDD's pillars, constant refactoring keeps the evil design upfront at bay and maintain our codebases in a healthy state. One of the few things I think most developers agree on is that refactorings are helpful and should be done at some point in any project, preferably in a continuous manner.
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The idea of Full-Stack Development is quite popular at the moment — building things that run both the browser and the server side of web development, usually utilizing similar languages and frameworks. With Flow-Based Programming and the emerging Flowhub ecosystem, we can take this even further. Thanks to the FBP network protocol we can build and monitor graphs spanning multiple devices and flow-based environments. Jon Nordby ga....
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When I sat down to write this yesterday afternoon, two of the top five articles on Hacker News were not actually articles at all: the first pointed to a Microsoft page extolling the virtues of their new CEO Satya Nadella, below which the fifth “story” linked to Firefox 27’s release notes. In no universe would any person categorize either of these pages as something that “gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.” In fact, I would say we can l..
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The following is taken from my response to a Hacker News comment. The comment follows (quoted) and my response below. “I will start doing TDD when, 1. It is faster than developing without it. 2. It doesn’t result in a ton of brittle tests that can’t survive an upgrade or massive change in the API that is already enough trouble to manage on the implementation-side- even though there may be no functional changes!
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You just learned how to create a simple WordPress plugin, and now you hear people talking about how WordPress is becoming more object-oriented. What does that mean? Lets take a step back and start with the basics. Most simple WordPress plugins are written using procedural programming. This means that your code excited from top to bottom; calling functions and setting variables along the way. A prime example of this is the default WordPres..
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01/02/05 – 14/01/05 Well I figured I may as well add an end of the story, I believe that anyone who reads this deserves and end to the story and hence I am writing this for you all. Anyways what to say….. Here is my description of New Years Eve for you all. IT WAS LIKE THE APOCALYPSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Gunpowder smoke everywhere (making it hard to see), fires burning in the street, fireworks launching in the sky, enough small ban..
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3/11/04 – 5/11/04 Let me recap the conversation I had with Tiff on the 5th over the phone. “Hello?” “Tiff Sorry about waking you. Have a look out the window” “Ok if I have to… OH MY GOD!!! SNOW!!!! I NEED TO CALL MY MUM!” Yes that’s correct. On the 5th I awoke to a winter wonderland outside. Not much snow apparently but it was enough to get Tiff and I excited. We had a snowball fight in the trees outside her and Susan’s room before clas....
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Everything below is from when I was in University and went on exchange to Heilongjiang University in Harbin China. Please excuse the spelling and whatever is below as I did write it quite a while ago. This content is taken from http://silica.csu.edu.au/depot/dapeng/harbin/ as I want to preserve a copy just in case it is lost. I will be making a copy of the photos available at some point as there is a lot of content in there I would also l..
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It has only been a few days since Dogemate was released, but dogeapi.com has made a slight change to their API that broke the USD price checker. Yesterday I submitted version 1.1.0 for an expedited review so hopefully it will be available soon. The new version adds both currency conversion and two new Bitcoin exchange... Read more » The post Dogemate Bugfix & Features Update first appeared on Swift Fox Software LLC .
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I completely agree with Sid here: the growth of the internet as a widely-accepted medium through which to publish one’s thoughts and opinions as was once handled exclusively through corporate newspaporial publications with batteries of editors at their disposal has led to a net decline in literary quality over the last few years. The popularity of the link blog certainly did not help, perhaps it even compounded the already steady march, but..
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