Category: technical
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A dive into the many faces of manifolds
What are manifolds? I started down this rabbit hole because of Chris Colah’s excellent Neural Networks / Functional programming blog post: At their crudest, types in computer science are a way of embedding some kind of data in n bits. Similarly, representations in deep learning are a way to embed a data manifold in n…
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Vim Airline Powerline fonts on Fedora, Ubuntu and Windows
N.B. I’ve also answered this on Vi Stack Exchange, but I’m posting it here as it took a lot of work. This took hours to figure out, so here’s more of a dummies guide for Fedora/Ubuntu, with a special section for Windows. The first is figuring out what the hell are those strange but nice…
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Self-driving cars should first replace amateur instead of professional drivers
Photo credit: cheers Prasad Kholkute Professional drivers, i.e. lorry, bus and taxi drivers are under threat from being replaced by computers. Whilst amateur drivers, all the rest of us, feel no pressure to stop. I want to lay out the reasons why this is backwards. Amateur drivers should be replaced, whilst professional drivers should have…
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On the power of netbooks and laptops over Android/iOS
iOS and Android turn tablets into oversized phones, so no surprise they lose against phones – they have the same (or usually worse, at a given price point) capabilities while being larger, thus less convenient to carry and more fragile. – TeMPOraL on HN Windows did try the same as Android and iOS with Windows…
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Yet another monad explanation
Photo credit: cheers @laimagendelmundo tl;dr Here’s a really short explanation for JavaScript, as in just the flatmap part. map is pretty well understood in JavaScript (and I’m assuming you understand it). So you ‘just’ need to make the leap to flatmap. Which is mapping something and flattening the result. Flattening a JavaScript array is concatenating…
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Password randomness and the UX of passwords
I’ve been having a look at passwords again as the WooCommerce/WordPress password strength meter has been causing problems. The password meter actually likes the method popularised by XKCD – which assuming random words seems to have had it’s maths checked and re-checked and is based on a lower bound assumption (worst case scenario) that someone…
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Attacking the modern JavaScript world
Learning all the JavaScript libraries that have come out in the past two years is hard work. I attacked the modern Javascript approach through first focusing on functional programming. 1) Python + functional programming in Python Python is hardly a pure functional language, but it’s lovely and simple and has all the core concepts including…
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Functional Learnings of Python
Photo credit: cheers Hembo Pagi This is my attempt at converting a solution to a pascal’s triangle problem that I’d written in an imperitive manner into a functional one. I kind of hope that anyone reading this is also trying to figure out the meanings behind functional programming, I’m trying to describe all the steps…
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Getting the gist of segment trees
Segment Trees Wow they seem overly complex to learn about. They’re a very easy concept, but there is a paucity of resources for explaining them. Have a gander at the resources at the bottom for the ones I came across. Took me ages to figure out the differences between them. Here, I assume you know…
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Linux Mint Dual Boot
It’s not supposed to be this painful. I finally (9 months after first attempt) got a UEFI dual boot working. TL;DR Follow one of these: http://itsfoss.com/install-ubuntu-1404-dual-boot-mode-windows-8-81-uefi/ http://www.tweaking4all.com/os-tips-and-tricks/uefi-dual-boot-windows81-ubuntu/ I’m calling Linux Mint my lucky charm as that was the first one I got working as a Vagrant desktop and it’s worked perfectly now that I’ve sorted…
Ian Channing 