124 private links
Some hints: Naming Convention; Keyword First Syntax; Type Last Syntax; No Dangling Else; Everything Is An Expression, Including Blocks; etc.
Science-fiction writer, journalist and longtime Slashdot reader, Cory Doctorow, a.k.a. mouthbeef, writes:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) just published the latest installment in my case histories of "adversarial interoperability" -- once the main force that kept tech competitive. Today, I tell the story of Gopher, the web's immediate predecessor, which burrowed under the mainframe systems' guardians and created a menu-driven interface to campus resources, then the whole internet. Gopher ruled until browser vendors swallowed Gopherspace whole, incorporating it by turning gopher:// into a way to access anything on any Gopher server. Gopher served as the booster rocket that helped the web attain a stable orbit. But the tools that Gopher used to crack open the silos, and the moves that the web pulled to crack open Gopher, are radioactively illegal today.
If you wanted do to Facebook what Gopher did to the mainframes, you would be pulverized by the relentless grinding of software patents, terms of service, anticircumvention law, bullshit theories about APIs being copyrightable. Big Tech blames "network effects" for its monopolies -- but that's a counsel of despair. If impersonal forces (and not anticompetitive bullying) are what keeps tech big then there's no point in trying to make it small. Big Tech's critics swallow this line, demanding that Big Tech be given state-like duties to police user conduct -- duties that require billions and total control to perform, guaranteeing tech monopolists perpetual dominance. But the lesson of Gopher is that adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects.
More Americans are being sent home to die, placing an overwhelming financial and caregiving burden on families.
Email is unsafe and cannot be made safe. The tools we have today to encrypt email are badly flawed. Even if those flaws were fixed, email would remain unsafe. Its problems cannot plausibly be mitigated. Avoid encrypted email.
Technologists hate this argument. Few of them specialize in cryptography or privacy, but all of them are interested in it, and many of them tinker with encrypted email tools.
Most email encryption on the Internet is performative, done as a status signal or show of solidarity.
Use the cheat utility to keep Linux cheat sheets handy on the command line. Personalize your cheat sheets by editing and creating them to suit your needs.
There are lots of laws which people discuss when talking about development. This repository is a reference and overview of some of the most common ones.
Some examples: Hofstadter's Law, Kernighan's Law, Metcalfe's Law, Moore's Law, Murphy's Law, Occam's Razor, etc.
I long ago stopped reading books on note-taking.
They were always too vague and boring, full of platitudes that had little to do with the world outside academia.
I especially avoided “how-to” style books on the subject.
They would often list dozens of tips and tricks that had little to do with each other. There was never an overarching system for turning notes into concrete results.
But recently I picked up How To Take Smart Notes (affiliate link) by Sönke Ahrens. Ahrens is a Lecturer in Philosophy of Education at the University of Duisburg-Essen and also coaches students, academics, and professionals with a focus on time management, decision-making, and personal growth.
This article contains the flow-charts of many common programming language constructs that involve distinct combinations of gotos. The goto (or jump) is a basic building block of control flow, therefore most control flow constructs can be modelled using it.
Cod is a new command line completion daemon written in Go for Bash and Zsh. The tool detects the usage of --help to generate autocompletion for commands that don't support this.
In Norway, way up by the Arctic circle, global warming is already affecting people and nature. Here's how.
We are releasing HiPlot, a lightweight interactive visualization tool to help AI researchers discover correlations and patterns in high-dimensional data.
This tutorial explains how to browse the web with Vim Keybindings using Vimium extension. Vimium allows you to navigate the Internet just using Keyboard.
At Axel Springer, Europe’s largest digital publishing house, we own a lot of news articles from various media outlets such as Welt, Bild, Business Insider and many more. Arguably, the most important part of a news article is its title, and it is not surprising that journalists tend to spend a fair amount of their time to come up with a good one. For this reason, it was an interesting research question for us at Axel Springer AI whether we could create an NLP model that generates quality headlines from Welt news articles (see Figure 1). This could, for example, serve our journalists as inspiration for creating SEO titles, which our journalists often don’t have time for (in fact we’re working together with our colleagues from SPRING and AWS on creating a SEO title generator).
Then some little smarty decided that the operating system shouldn’t have all the fun and that developers should be able to create exception conditions and use this new architecture themselves, and in what is likely one of the worst things to ever happen to software development until pair programming came along, extended the new architecture with throw
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If you round the result of every computation, then you can get exactly correct financial calculations using floating-point numbers, for realistic ranges of values.
bandwhich is a relatively new terminal bandwidth utilization tool for Linux, *BSD and macOS, written in Rust. It shows the current network utilization by process, connection and remote IP/hostname.
Clearview AI devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
Analyses of single-cell recordings from mouse ventral tegmental area are consistent with a model of reinforcement learning in which the brain represents possible future rewards not as a single mean of stochastic outcomes, as in the canonical model, but instead as a probability distribution.