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Many hard LeetCode problems are easy constraint problems
Use the right tool for the job.
Hillel Wayne
Buttondown is the last email platform you'll migrate to. We're focused on your success, not on bleeding you dry.
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- #132 personal
Visit buttondown.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Aug 2024 – Sep 2026
Software Engineering 26Math & Algorithms 12History & Retro Computing 7Tech Industry & Business 7Systems & Performance 4Career & Management 4
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Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel (2020)
No newsletter next week Running the TLA+ workshop. No way I'm gonna have any brainpower after that. Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel...
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How RSS beat Microsoft
Microsoft tried to own content syndication with ICE. How open RSS beat it, and what that war teaches us about open formats like email.
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Unusual Raku Features
Junctions, whatevers, hypers, and more!
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Why Not Comments
Why not "why not" comments? Not why "not comments"
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The many JavaScript runtimes of the last decade
This last decade has seen an inundation of new JavaScript runtimes (and engines in equal measure), enabling us to run JavaScript in all manner of contexts...
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What TLA+ can and can't check
Let's chill just a little bit on the "TLA+ will save AI from itself" narrative
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Email could have been X.400 times better
X.400 promised recallable, scheduled, self-destructing email. Why simple SMTP won instead, and what we lost and gained when it did.
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AMP and why emails are not (and should never be) interactive
Google's AMP for Email promised interactive, dynamic messages. Why senders and email clients rejected it, and why email should never be interactive.
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Why did containers happen?
Autumn update This is what it is looking like around here at the moment. DevOpsDays London I gave a talk at DevOpsDays London recently. It was a nice...
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Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch
Lotus Notes had encryption, rich text, and read receipts before email did. Why it still failed, and the dangers of starting software from scratch.
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Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice
"Correct" doesn't mean "correct" when correctly using "correct"
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Famous cognitive psychology experiments that failed to replicate
A quick reference
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Refuse to let your doctor record you
By: Emily M. Bender and Decca Muldowney At a recent appointment, Emily’s physical therapist (who knows some about her research) said, “Before we get started,...
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Adventures in Probability
I hope everyone had a good weekend. I went on a hike. It was great. Statistics One of my great school regrets, next to “taking three years of business...
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What does “Undecidable” mean, anyway
An explainer for people who don't know computer science and are mildly curious
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My Gripes with Prolog
It's not my favorite language
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The death of thread per core
Programming language async runtimes are very focused on handling asynchronous, possibly long running tasks, that might yield for a variety of reasons, that...
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The Opposite of Documentation is Superstition (2020)
Yes I know I'm technically on vacation but if I go too long without writing I die from a witch's curse and I don't want to work on longform projects For...
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In 1985 Maxell built a bunch of life-size robots for its bad floppy ad
A rough start to what would later become one of my favorite tech ads from the 80s.
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Caching is an abstraction, not an optimization
I've always been told that caching is a tool to make software faster. That, given some careful considerations to consistency, caching makes it so that when...
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Solving LinkedIn Queens with SMT
For sure easier than solving it in SAT!
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Five Kinds of Nondeterminism
Or four kinds, or six kinds, I'm not picky about how you count them
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What I love about Django
The best parts of Django are the ones you stop noticing — a tour of the abstractions that have given Buttondown the most leverage over the years.
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Pie doesn't need to be original unless you claim it so
View this post in browser Your pie doesn't need to be original (unless you claim it so) Imagine you bake a delicious peach pie over the weekend, and you...
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Columnar Storage Is Normalization
Something I didn't understand for a while is that the process of turning row-oriented data into column-oriented data isn't a totally bespoke, foreign concept...
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Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
A beloved hometown impersonator had no idea what he was signing up for with this photoshoot.
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Stroustrup's Rule (2024)
Beginners need explicit syntax, experts want terse syntax.
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It's not enough for a program to work – it has to work for the right reasons
Successful software is buggy software.
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Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)
What started as endearingly bootstrapped marketing descended into soulless corporate sales.