Category Archives: Uncategorized

When a friend IM’d me and told me she saw an article saying that MongoDB had filed for IPO, I embarked on a months-long journey of discovering that I knew nothing about IPOs. I found it a bit difficult to get information about them, so I figured I’d write up what I learned. This isContinue reading “IPOs, 101”

I was standing on the street corner with Domino and a group of schoolkids came up. “Hey, can I show you a magic trick?” one of them asked. “Uh…” “Think of a number,” he said. “Ok.” “Now add 4 to it.” “Ok.” “Now add 5 to it.” “Ok.” “Now add 1 to it.” “Ok.” “NowContinue reading “A magic trick”

I’ve been reading P.T. Barnum’s autobiography and came across an interesting passage about when he was employed at Mr. Taylor’s (maybe of Lord & Taylor’s? Not sure) shop: My employer manifested great interest in me, and treated me with the upmost kindness, but the situation did not suit me. The fact is, there are someContinue reading “P.T. Barnum on salary vs. equity”

I’ve been messing around with Keras, a ML library that makes it pretty easy to do AI experiments. I decided to try out image recognition, so I found a picture of Domino in a fez: Then I wrote the following Python program which uses the existing ResNet50 image recognition library. import numpy as np fromContinue reading “The next great frontier in ML: dogs in hats”

Here is what my inbox look like each morning: All those pink-tagged messages are emails from GitHub. Gmail cannot figure out which ones are important and GitHub’s notification stream, in my experience, is useless. It’s noisy and doesn’t clear the way I’d expect. The problem is, people actually do mention me on bugs. And IContinue reading “GitHub notification… notifier”

By default, Bazel tries not to include anything about the system state in build outputs. However, released binaries and libraries often want to include something like the version they were built at or the branch or tag they came from. To reconcile this, Bazel has an option called the workspace status command. This command isContinue reading “Stamping your builds”

When I started blogging, I called my blog “Snail in a Turtleneck,” a cute image that Andrew & I came up with. I drew up my mascot: and I began posting cartoons I had drawn. I quickly became bored of doing cartoons, and found I was more motivated to put up technical blog posts. MostContinue reading “Snail Spam”

I’ve recently been working on a side project that uses WebGL and a physics engine that was transpiled from C++ into JavaScript so… printing variable to the console and using the debugger just weren’t cutting it. I started thinking about the other ways I debug things: Ship of Theseus debugging: the ship of Theseus isContinue reading “Four alternative debugging techniques”

Bazel lets you set up various “modes” of compilation. There are several built-in (fast, optimized, debug) and you can define your own. The built in ones are: Fast: build your program as quickly as possible. This is generally best for development (when you want a tight compile/edit loop) and is the default, when you don’tContinue reading “Compilation à la mode”