Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset
Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset for the geospatial community (via) I did not expect this! […] we are announcing today the general availability of a foundational open data set, Foursquare Open Source Places (“FSQ OS Places”). This base layer of 100mm+ global places of interest (“POI”) includes 22 core attributes (see schema […]
AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing
Today’s journey is Anti-Aliasing and the destination is Analytical Anti-Aliasing. Getting rid of rasterization jaggies is an art-form with decades upon decades of maths, creative techniques and non-stop innovation. With so many years of research and development, there are many flavors. From the simple but resource intensive SSAA, over theory dense SMAA, to using machine […]
Yhangry (YC W22) Is Hiring 2 Mid-Level Full-Stack Engineers
Yhangry is like Airbnb, but for finding a chef to cook for an event: Their birthday, a hen party or a family Christmas gathering. We’re changing the lives of chefs: Chefs earn 3x more than working in a restaurant, whilst working fewer hours. E.g. Chefs working 60 hours per week can maintain the same income […]
Lush: My favorite small programming language
I meant to write about this when I started my blog in 2009. Eventually Lush kind of faded out of my consciousness, as it was a lot easier to get work doing stuff in R or Matlab or whatever. The guy who was maintaining the code moved on to other things. The guys who wrote […]
Trivial REST server in various languages to compare
Problem statement The server listens on localhost:8000 and exposes /version endpoint. The /version endpoint returns a RESTful JSON response with the “version” fields. The payload should be serialized to JSON from a struct or class, not printed as a simple string. Other routes, root included, should return 404. When the server runs, it should respond […]
A summer intern once saved Valve from a near-fatal lawsuit
First Spotted by 80 Level, Secret Tape’s massive documentary on the development of Half-Life 2 contains an almost unbelievable story of how Valve was saved from legal and financial ruin thanks to the actions of a single summer intern, paving the way for PC gaming as we know it today. The trouble started when Valve […]
Let’s Encrypt is 10 years old now
Vital personal and business information flows over the Internet more frequently than ever, and we don’t always know when it’s happening. It’s clear at this point that encrypting is something all of us should be doing. Then why don’t we use TLS (the successor to SSL) everywhere? Every browser in every device supports it. Every […]
Blender 4.3
Splash artwork by Blender Studio Released November 19th, 2024 EEVEE It’s (real-)time for LIGHT LINKING The real-time renderer EEVEE now supports Light Linking and Shadow Linking—features previously available only in Cycles. With light linking, lights can be set to affect only specific objects in the scene. Shadow linking additionally gives control over which objects acts […]
Understanding the BM25 full text search algorithm
Nov 19, 2024 BM25, or Best Match 25, is a widely used algorithm for full text search. It is the default in Lucene/Elasticsearch and SQLite, among others. Recently, it has become common to combine full text search and vector similarity search into “hybrid search”. I wanted to understand how full text search works, and specifically […]
Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unreal Tournament Forever
from the was-that-so-hard? dept One of the most frustrating aspects in the ongoing conversation around the preservation of older video games, also known as cultural output, is the collision of IP rights and some publishers’ unwillingness to both continue to support and make available these older games and their refusal to release those same games […]