Viewing profile — sirgawain33

I really liked Dr. Dwork's Turing lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsA4w3itxA0 It's an introduction to differential privacy to an academic audience (i.e. not necessarily co…

Differential Privacy is a mathematical property. Here is the precise definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy#Definitio... One way to phrase it intuitively is…

I was curious how this application approached privacy budget management (e.g. how the privacy parameter ε is accounted for over multiple searches), but, flipping through the source…

I've been partial to Heinlein's idea of the "general specialist" lately: "Computermen sent up to install Mike were on short-term bonus contracts— get job done fast before irreversi…

Great article. I'll add one: caching doesn't address underlying performance issues, just "sweeps them under the rug". I've seen many devs jump to caching before investing time in u…

I highly recommend this road as well. Three exercises along the lines of the parent that I found particularly valuable: 1. Compare VanillaJS TodoMVC to your framework of choice htt…

Instead of "buckling down", I have found the opposite the be pretty effective. William James explains: "If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and va…

Unless I'm being thick, I think the point of this parable is to question the developer, not the interviewer. Despite using a bunch of fancy new language feature, name-dropping Knut…

Would be interesting to see some specs/measurements to substantiate their proposed energy savings -- without an insulated heating vessel it's hard to believe this is more energy ef…

Haha, I am not an expert in the least. I would be happy to hear my evidence is bunk. I'm just trying to point toward a source that I found interesting and informative. Indeed, with…

We don't eat bananas anymore in our house, largely for the reasons outlined in the article. The thumbnail summary: bananas only started being widely consumed in the 1960s because o…

I used to think I had this problem, too. I developed an elaborate categorizing and indexing scheme. I tried to apply it outside of my personal knowledge, creating a crawler/indexer…

I could dig up examples of nicer looking finned pots. The name escapes me at the moment, but I remember seeing one at a conference last year. The point is that the technique was we…

This article is a great example of NIH syndrome. You can get the same improvement with "About $5 of materials and an hour of time." [1] That's by Dale Andreatta, a mechanical engin…

The machine worked! We boiled water for a few cups of coffee. The write up is coming. Eventually.

I spent two years in rural Vietnam setting rice husk on fire. [1] Here are two pictures if you're curious what they look like in larger quantities (the videos linked in other comme…

I've bought over 100 books in the last 6 months. Maybe more. I wouldn't step foot into any of the bookshops proposed here. 70% of so of my books are from a local thrift shop. We go…

Great link to the talk, thank you. I haven't seen a good TED talk in years, but this was an exception. That said, I agree with the other comments in this thread that linking the bl…

Anything by William James. A Rorty and Dewey book are on my shelf. A few authors mentioned by James that I liked: JS Mill, is one. Interestingly, Jack London treats themes in pragm…

Notch had really similar advice in the Minecraft movie. The interview asks him for advice for aspiring game devs, and he responds in a wonderful deadpan: "don't follow any advice" …

Don't miss the fractal ants at the bottom! A wonderful visual analogy that shows Bret practices the ideas he's encountering in this research. I started taking research notes this y…

I upped my amount of reading taking the opposite approach to the author: buying more books that I don't read. The mechanics work something like this: - its easier to read a book yo…

I learned French in a way with many similarities: I took a semester of engineering courses at a French uni. Like the author notes, the trick seemed to be (1) you are interested in …