The Insider News

Dr. Bunsen[^]:

Time Machine has been an integral component of my backup system since its inception in OS X 10.5. Despite its utility, I dislike how backup snapshots are handled when Time Machine’s hard drive is full.... This post is about my backup tool called Time Warp and how I use it to modify Time Machine’s backup behavior using weighted reservoir sampling. I built Time Warp to preserve important backup snapshots and prevent Time Machine from deleting them.

Chris Lowis[^]:

The Web Audio API turns your browser into a powerful synthesizer. One question I’ve been asked about the Web Audio API is how to play single, one-shot sounds using the oscillators, in other words how to play notes or tunes. I’ll show one approach in this post and along the way we’ll look at how some early analogue monophonic synths worked.

Simple Developer[^]:

Hello there. Thank you for stopping by. Now, about the growing group of people teaching themselves software development or computer programming, there is no doubt they may miss certain skills that college education might offer. I am very confident that most people would like to go to school if they could afford it. That being said however, not all is lost because after knowing what you lack, you can then go about learning the skills. The most dangerous thing is not knowing what you need.

Open Source @ Jane Street[^]:

The notes fall into the following categories: notes about the cost of commonly used OCaml constructs and general recommendations that might help speed up OCaml code; notes on reading OCaml assembly code so that you may understand what your own OCaml programs do on the CPU. When possible I have tried to motivate these with snippets of assembly code generated by ocamlopt.

Businessweek[^]:

By 2010, HFT accounted for more than 60 percent of all U.S. equity volume and seemed positioned to swallow the rest. Swanson, tired of Citi’s bureaucracy, left, and in mid-2011 opened his own HFT firm. The private equity firm Technology Crossover Ventures gave him tens of millions to open a trading shop, which he called Eladian Partners. If things went well, TCV would kick in another multimillion-dollar round in 2012. But things didn’t go well.

functionspace.org[^]:

Today is Leonhard Euler's 306th birthday. Euler was one of the most influential and prolific mathematicians in history. He had published over 800 papers and 20 books, making him the greatest contributor in mathematics.... In this article, we'll try to understand the most beautiful equation in all of mathematics: eiπ+1=0 It connects the five most important constants of mathematics and three most important mathematical operations - addition, multiplication and exponentiation. So, how did Euler arrived at this result?

Electronic Frontier Foundation[^]:

Today, the Guardian newspaper confirmed what EFF (and many others) have long claimed: the NSA is conducting widespread, untargeted, domestic surveillance on millions of Americans.... In plain language: the order gave the NSA a record of every Verizon customer’s call history -- every call made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other “identifying information” for the phone and call.

Exploring IE[^]:

On World Environment Day, we are proud to announce that Internet Explorer continues to be the most energy-efficient browser on Windows 8, according to the Center for Sustainable Energy Systems at Fraunhofer USA. When compared to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer uses up to 18% less energy. This means that if every Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox user in the United States switched to Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 for a year, the energy saved could power over 10,000 households in the United States for that year.

aeonmagazine.com[^]:

We web developers are the limiting reagent of every start-up experiment, we’re the sine qua non, because we’re the only ones who know how to reify app ideas as actual working software. In fact, we are so much the essence of these small companies that, in Silicon Valley, a start-up with no revenue is said to be worth exactly the number of developers it has on staff. The rule of thumb is that each one counts for $1 million. It helps that there aren’t enough of us to go around.