San Francisco aerial views from 1938 – A startlingly high-resolution zoomable map of the city from 75 years ago. The detail is amazing, as are the sand dunes across what’s now the Sunset neighborhood. It’s an incredible resource for anyone interested in our local history.
One weird kernel trick – Ad spam for ML researchers – “the secret to learning any problem with just ten training samples”!
Encoding messages in public SSH keys – Pimp your public RSA key with a custom message!
Why we need a compiler with a long-term support release – Dependencies are the devil, and compilers are at the root of most dependency trees. I can’t even imagine how much wrangling it takes to keep a big software platform compiling across dozens of architectures, but this heartfelt plea from the trenches gives me a flavor of the suffering involved. In a few decades we’ll be stuck searching for complete VMs to run old software, since most of the frameworks they depend on will have rotted off the internet.
Archaeology and Github – Liberating data from hard-to-OCR tables at the end of papers, and into a simple shared environment. I don’t know if Github is the right space for this, but like wikis, programmers are the early adopters of collaboration tools, so it’s a good place to start.
Pete Warden's blog 