There’s an old compiler-building tutorial that has become part of the field’s lore: the Let’s Build a Compiler series by Jack Crenshaw (published between 1988 and 1995). I ran into it in 2003 and was very impressed, but it’s now … Read more
The most famous quote from Knuth’s paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” is this: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed … Read more
The remarkable story of Bill Benter and how he amassed a staggering $1B fortune betting on horses in Hong Kong has been extensively documented in the article, The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code1. In 1994, Benter published an academic … Read more
I mentioned last time that I’ve been working on a new website for Emmy-award-winning game composer Mike Worth. He hired me to create a highly graphical design that showcases his work. Mike loves ’90s animation, particularly Disney’s Duck Tales and … Read more
A few months ago, I wrote about my experiencing with a random number generation service that I threw together over a couple days at the Recurse Center. I left the site up as it was costing me nothing to host … Read more
I recently picked up an embedded project in which I needed to build a highly customized full system image with minimal boot times. As I explored my options, I came to the conclusion that NetBSD, the often-forgotten BSD variant, was … Read more
Another day, another idol falls. This one has been teetering for years, so the collapse didn’t come as a shock. But that doesn’t make it any less painful. I’m talking about stereotype threat, a once-revolutionary idea that shaped how social … Read more
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86’s real mode. There was one question that came up and remained unanswered: what were … Read more
There are a few mathematical results that any researcher in applied mathematics uses on a daily basis. One of them is Jensen’s inequality, which allows bounding expectations of functions of random variables. This really happens a lot in any probabilistic … Read more
Back in 2011 I put together an implementation of Pong that uses an Arduino Pro, a couple of resistors, a couple of potentiometers, and two sweet cans from M&S. I called it the Cansole: video game console in a can. … Read more