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Chat Wars

Those were the years of Microsoft’s long, slow decline, which continues to this day. The number of things wrong with the company was extraordinary, but they can be summed up by the word bureaucracy. Early on at Microsoft—and even later, when we first started Messenger—you could just do things.

Click to view the original at nplusonemag.com

Hasnain says:

This is really really well written. Reads like a story. It talks about how an engineer on the MSN messenger team would keep trying to reverse engineer the AOL client and how AOL tried to stop his efforts.

"This was tricky, vastly trickier than anything they’d done so far. It was also a bit outside the realm of fair play: exploiting a security hole in their own client that our client didn’t have!"

Posted on 2014-04-19T21:53:56+0000

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A Sea Story

One of the worst maritime disasters in European history took place a decade ago. It remains very much in the public eye. On a stormy night on the Baltic Sea, more than 850 people lost their lives when a luxurious ferry sank below the waves. From a mass of material, including official and unofficial…

Click to view the original at theatlantic.com

Hasnain says:

This is a ten-year old story on a twenty-year old disaster in which 850 people lost their lives. It recounts the last moments of various people on that ship, reconstructed from the stories of the few survivors.

Well worth reading, especially in light of the current Korean disaster.

Posted on 2014-04-18T16:52:19+0000

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Hasnain says:

The OpenBSD team making funny comments as they rip out tons of cruft from openssl.

I love "Do not feed RSA private key information to the random subsystem as entropy. "

Posted on 2014-04-18T02:37:13+0000

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Hasnain says:

I like how dota2 is off the charts in terms of total hours played; yet football manager 2014 kicks its butt in terms of hours played.

It's also scary how dota2 has a mean of 147.7 hours played and a median < 19.

(graphs at http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/04/introducing-steam-gauge-ars-reveals-steams-most-popular-games/2/)

Posted on 2014-04-18T02:22:24+0000

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Go Performance Tales

The last few months I've had the pleasure of working on a new bit of intake processing at Datadog. It was our first production service written in Go, and I wanted to nail the performance of a few vital consumer, processing, and scheduling idioms that would form the basis for future projects. I wrote…

Click to view the original at jmoiron.net

Hasnain says:

This is a really insightful article. Especially:

"A quick grep aes /proc/cpuinfo showed that the aws c1.xlarge box I was on lacked these. After finding another machine in the same class with them, throughput increased by 50-65% and strhash's prominence was drastically reduced in the profiles."

Posted on 2014-04-17T17:03:33+0000

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Railroaders' Guide to Healthy Sleep

� A resource from the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School Sponsored by the Federal Railroad Administration, an operating mode of the U.S. Department of Transportation Produced in partnership with WGBH Educational Foundation and the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Cente…

Click to view the original at healthysleep.med.harvard.edu

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http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

When an experimental study states "The group with treatment X had significantly less disease (p = 1%)", many people interpret this statement as being equivalent to "there is a 99% chance that if I do treatment X it will prevent disease." This essay explains why these statements are not equivalent. F…

Click to view the original at norvig.com

Hasnain says:

"Prof. Michael Wigler has a more pessimistic way of putting it (quoted by Natalie Angier): "Most of the time, when you get an amazing, counterintuitive result, it means you screwed up the experiment.""

Worth reading. Norvig concludes with

"By now you should see that much can go wrong between the simple statement of "this result is significant at p=1%." and the conclusion about what that really means. As Darell Huff said, "it is easy to lie with statistics," but as Frederick Mosteller said, "it is easier to lie without them." By scrutinizing experiments against the checklist provided here, you have a better chance of separating truth from fiction."

Posted on 2014-04-16T21:36:54+0000

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Hasnain says:

Some cool security/vision work. I'm pretty sure their algorithms for CAPTCHAs beat most humans by a wide margin. Which kind of defeats the point of having a CAPTCHA in the first place.

Posted on 2014-04-16T21:05:24+0000

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http://artyom.me/learning-racket-1

Alternative title: A Haskell Programmer Tries to Learn Racket (a Language from Lisp/Scheme Family), Documenting This New Experience with Quite Unusual Honesty and Diligence, All the While Secretly Plotting to Steal the Good Bits Which Haskell Doesn't Currently Have.

Click to view the original at artyom.me