Beautiful Bytecodes

An MP for the Scottish National Party, Joanna Cherry, gave an excellent speech during the debate in parliament yesterday of the Investigatory Powers Bill (Snoopers Charter). She said most of the things I wanted someone to say, and in an eloquent way. I’m quoting it here for future reference. Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP): Before I begin my speech, on behalf of the Scottish National Party I want to associate myself with the comments of the Home Secretary and shadow Home Secretary regarding the death of the prison officer in Northern Ireland and extend my party’s heartfelt condolences and...…

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) has ambitious goals. It aims to decentralise the internet, make it more secure, and enable the creation of purely distributed applications. It combines some of the best features of the peer-to-peer protocol BitTorrent, the version control system Git and distributed hash tables. There is no central node, and nodes do not need to trust each other. …

The other day I was writing a web user interface in Javascript to view a dataset and I discovered that some calls to set innerHTML on a div element were taking over a minute (in Chrome). This line was the culprit: someDiv.innerHTML = newHTML; …

The construction of the Surreal numbers. We’ve all heard of integers, rationals, reals, even complex numbers, but what on earth are surreal numbers? They are a beautiful way of defining a class of numbers which includes all reals, but also ordinal numbers; i.e. all the different infinities and even infinitesimal numbers. Not only this but we get a full system of arithmetic for all these numbers. Ever wondered what ($\infty-1$) is, or $\sqrt{\infty}$ ? Before we get stuck into that, let’s learn some history. It all started a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (Cambridge in...…