How to build your prototypes without a 35% tariff
Ryan and Ben welcome Alex Malcoci, CEO and founder of MiniProto, to talk innovations in hardware prototyping, the evolving complexities of the global supply chain, the impact of the US-China trade war on manufacturing, and how automation in production could lead to new training programs for future engineers.
Read moreUniformity increases entropy
Suppose you have a system with n possible states. The entropy of the system is maximized when all states are equally likely to occur. The entropy is minimized when one outcome is certain to occur. You can say more. Starting from any set of probabilities, as you move in the direction
Read moreChris’ Corner: Modern CSS Features Coming Together
I like the term “content aware components” like Eric Bailey uses in the Piccalilli article Making content-aware components using CSS :has(), grid, and quantity queries. Does a card have a photo? Yes, do one thing, no, do another. That sort of thing. Eric has some good examples where a UI
Read moreSinc function approximation
The sinc function sinc(x) = sin(x) / x comes up continually in signal processing. If x is moderately small, the approximation sinc(x) ≈ (2 + cos(x))/3 is remarkably good, with an error on the order of x4/180. This could be useful in situations where you’re working with the sinc function and the x
Read moreArithmetic for fun and profit
Four years ago I wrote a blog post about simple solutions to client problems. The post opens by recounting a conversation with a friend that ended with my friend saying “So, basically you’re recommending division.” That conversation came back to me recently when I had a similar conversation during a
Read moreRed Flags in Social Media: How Developers Can Benefit From Online Behavior Analysis
Learn how developers can use Socialprofiler to analyze potential partners, investors, and collaborators before making critical business decisions. Continue reading Red Flags in Social Media: How Developers Can Benefit From Online Behavior Analysis on SitePoint.
Read moreCost Effective Reseller Platforms for Buying SSL Certificates
Explore SSL certificate reselling: market growth, common challenges, auto-validation methods, and centralized lifecycle management. Continue reading Cost Effective Reseller Platforms for Buying SSL Certificates on SitePoint.
Read moreWhy use hash puzzles for proof-of-work?
A couple days ago I wrote about the the problem that Bitcoin requires to be solved as proof-of-work. In a nutshell, you need to tweak a block of transactions until the SHA256 double hash of its header is below a target value [1]. Not all cryptocurrencies use proof of work,
Read moreMinimize squared relative error
Suppose you have a list of positive data points y1, y2, …, yn and you wanted to find a value α that minimizes the squared distances to each of the y‘s. Then the solution is to take α to be the mean of the y‘s: This result is well known
Read moreWhat is the Bitcoin proof-of-work problem?
In order to prevent fraud, anyone wanting to add a block to the Bitcoin blockchain must prove that they’ve put in a certain amount of computational work. This post will focus on what problem must be solved in order produce proof of work. You’ll see the proof of work function
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