Slashdot and Sourceforge
If you’ve followed any tech news aggregator in the past week (the week of the 24th of May, 2015), you’ve probably seen the story about how...
Read moreCategory: General
The googlebot monopoly
TIL that Bell Labs and a whole lot of other websites block archive.org, not to mention most search engines. Turns out I have a broken website...
Read moreA defense of boring languages
Boring languages are underrated. Many appear to be rated quite highly, at least if you look at market share. But even so, they’re underrated. Despite the...
Read moreAdvantages of monorepos
Here’s a conversation I keep having: Someone: Did you hear that Facebook/Google uses a giant monorepo? WTF! Me: Yeah! It’s really convenient, don’t you think? Someone:...
Read moreWe used to build steel mills near cheap power. Now that’s where we build datacenters
Why are people so concerned with hardware power consumption nowadays? Some common answers to this question are that power is critically important for phones, tablets, and...
Read moreReading citations is easier than most people think
It’s really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns...
Read moreGiven that we spend little effort on testing, how should we test software?
I’ve been reading a lot about software testing, lately. Coming from a hardware background (CPUs and hardware accelerators), it’s interesting how different software testing is. Bugs...
Read moreWhat happens when you load a URL?
I’ve been hearing this question a lot lately, and when I do, it reminds me how much I don’t know. Here are some questions this question...
Read moreGoodhearting IQ, cholesterol, and tail latency
Most real-world problems are big enough that you can’t just head for the end goal, you have to break them down into smaller parts and set...
Read moreAI doesn’t have to be very good to displace humans
There’s an ongoing debate over whether “AI” will ever be good enough to displace humans and, if so, when it will happen. In this debate, the...
Read moreCPU backdoors
It’s generally accepted that any piece of software could be compromised with a backdoor. Prominent examples include the Sony/BMG installer, which had a backdoor built-in to...
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