David's blog

Jepsen and Docker

August 16, 2018 00:06

Recently I have been reading a series of very interesting posts by an Aphyr who tests distributed databases and then publishes their performance under network partition conditions, clock skews, dead nodes and ot...

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An Utilitarian View on Intelligence

April 09, 2016 22:56

The recent victories of AlphaGo has been but an interesting demonstration that machines are finally able to outplay masters at a highly complex game. Some may consider this to be the beginning of a real takeover of machines ala The Terminator, which to me is simply a fear of that which we do not un...

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Rotating Integrals

December 22, 2015 01:11

This post assumes you know some trigonometry and can do some integral calculus on it.

My little brother in college complained about sines and cosines in an indefinite integral today. Specifically, an integration that he was annoyed with was:

\[\int{x^3\,sin(x)\,dx}\]

It sounded like a whine...

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Finding Square Roots

June 12, 2015 01:36

Most of us has at some point in our lives used the Math.sqrt() function. We would even know that \(\sqrt{2} = 1.414\ldots\). However, we never really give how it is implemented a second thought. Thus is the power of a tight abstraction. For those of us who lived in the age of calculators, findi...

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Script for setting up FTP to a folder on a Mac

January 23, 2015 10:34

This script came in handy many times when I had to share things with my other laptops or windows users.

On a Mac you should have Ruby installed. Macs normally come with an ftpd whose frontend has been ripped out, so you can only do this on the command line. Basically, write this to a script file (...

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