You’ve probably played with model trains, for instance with something like the Brio set shown below.1 And if you’ve built a layout with a model train set, you may well have wondered: is it possible for my train to use all the parts of my track?

These APIs, from niche but useful to just plain fun, should make any software developer smile. @Enterprisenxt

Rebuttal to the opinion of Christoph Buchal, Hans-Dieter Karl and Hans-Werner Sinn titled “Coal Engines, Wind Engines and Diesel Engines. What does the CO2 balance show?”

Britney Crystal Gallivan (born 1985) of Pomona, California, is best known for determining the maximum number of times that paper or other materials can be folded in half.

This is the 4th post in a series about migrating to functional programming. This week, I'll first implement the Dijkstra algorithm, then migrate the code to a more functional-friendly design. Dijkstra's algorithm allows to find the shortest path in any graph, weighted or not, directed or not. The only requirement is that weights must be positive.

A guide to understand the importance of commit messages and how to write them well.

If you have a digital audio device that can connect your guitar to a PC, here is some software you can use to record, edit and process the signal.

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. The format includes a subset of the PostScript page description programming language, a font-embedding system, and a structural storage system.

Learn about 5 interesting Linux tools that will help break your dependence on the GUI and keep you productive on the command line.

If you are a Linux sysadmin, you tend to spend a lot of time on the command line. Over the years I have learned to do much of my work without ever touching the mouse. Also, if I open a browser it is just too easy to be distracted. Social media, news articles, and funny cat videos all are designed to suck you in, and it works. In this countdown we will explore 5 things you can do from the command line to keep you productive and break your dependence on the GUI.

• Check the Weather on the Command Line
• Do Calculations On The Command Line (calculator)
• The Command Line Dictionary
• Google Search From the Command Line
• Spell Check on the Command Line

Legendary investor, programmer, and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham once wrote that one of the best ways to come up with ideas for your next startup is to ask what product you wish someone else would make for you. For Stepan Pachikov, founder of Evernote, that product was a way to help him remember things. Although Pachikov first began working on what ultimately became Evernote back in 2002, his fascination with human memory stems from his experiences growing up in the former Soviet Union. To Pachikov, Evernote wasn't just another app or a way to capitalize on Silicon Valley's burgeoning

I created an Instagram page that showcased pictures of New York City’s skylines, iconic spots, elegant skyscrapers — you name it. The page has amassed a following of over 25,000 users in the NYC area and it’s still rapidly growing.

Calculating the mean of a list of numbers Consider the following problem:

You have a list of floating point numbers. No nasty tricks - these
aren’t NaN or Infinity, just normal “simple” floating point numbers.

Now: Calculate the mean (average). Can you do it?

It turns out this is a hard problem. It’s hard to get it even close to right. Lets see why.

To make note tak­ing using LaTeX vi­able, I had four goals in mind:

• Writ­ing text and math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las in LaTeX should be as fast as the lec­tur­er writ­ing on a black­board: no delay is ac­cept­able.
• Draw­ing fig­ures should be al­most as fast as the lec­tur­er.
• Man­ag­ing notes, i.e. adding a note, com­pil­ing all my notes, com­pil­ing the last two lec­tures, search­ing in notes, etc. should be easy and quick.
• An­no­tat­ing pdf doc­u­ments using LaTeX should be pos­si­ble for when I want to write notes along­side a pdf doc­u­ment.
  This blog post will focus on the first item: writ­ing LaTeX.

Firefox Send, send.firefox.com, is a free encrypted file transfer service that allows users to safely and simply share files from any browser.

In exchange for free mails, would you let your postman open your letters, read them, and insert ads related to their contents?

I am a bit dissatisfied with the use of the Tragedy of the commons to represent issues with free and open source software development. It is not an abstract resource that can be depleted when overused. It is not magically maintained if left alone.

It is based on the work of people, and we should not erase those people.

Unfortunately (and it is by design), most of the licences and the vocabulary around it are focused on the software’s user. After all, they work by reducing the creator’s right to empower the user.

As examples of this vocabulary, we have the distinction between “free as in beer” and “free as in speech” to show that the “free” word in “free software” has more to do with freedom and people’s rights to use, study, modify and share a program, than its actual price. Although, in practice, the overwhelming majority of FOSS will not cost you anything.

The author tried to edit data in spreadsheet programs.

This post illustrate ho to use Vim to edit tabular data, although there are a few things that will make it more pleasant. It is assumed that editing files are in tab-separated value format (TSV).

"But what about CSV files?" Just. Don't.

Do: convert your CSV to TSV and back for editing.

When it comes to using computers to steal money, few can come close to matching the success of Russian hacker Evgeniy Bogachev.

The $3 million bounty the FBI has offered for Bogachev’s capture is larger than any that has ever been offered for a cybercriminal—but that sum represents only a tiny fraction of the money he has stolen through his botnet GameOver ZeuS.1 At its height in 2012 and 2013, GameOver ZeuS, or GOZ, comprised between 500,000 and 1 million compromised computers all over the world that Bogachev could control remotely. For years, Bogachev used these machines to spread malware that allowed him to steal banking credentials and perpetrate online extortion.2 No one knows exactly how much money Bogachev stole from his thousands of victims using GOZ, but the FBI conservatively estimates that it was well over $100 million.