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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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Unusual Raku Features
Junctions, whatevers, hypers, and more!
4
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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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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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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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...
18
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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Fine, I'll Play With Skiplists
Follow me on Bluesky! A Log-Structured Merge tree, or LSM, is a popular data structure for storage engines. It’s what is used by RocksDB, which is sort of...
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I Prefer RST to Markdown (2024)
I will never stop dying on this hill
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Solving a “Layton Puzzle” with Prolog
I have a lot in the works for the this month's Logic for Programmers release. Among other things, I'm completely rewriting the chapter on Logic Programming...
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The Halting Problem is a terrible example of NP-Harder
It's a justifiable copout, but it's still a copout.
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When would you ever want bubblesort? (2023)
There are very few universal rules in software engineering, but there are are a lot of near-universal principles. Things like "prefer composition to...
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TLA from First Principles
Building an intuition for the mathematics behind the "TLA" in "TLA+"
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Formally Modeling Dreidel, the Sequel
2 model 2 dreidel