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Let's talk about joins
An review of horizontal and vertical joins with examples from education research.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
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Lowercase letters save data
Lowercase letters and uppercase letters use the same amout of data — 1 byte each.
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The bane of my existence: Supporting both async and sync code in Rust
Sit beside me and hear this crazy old man's tale of when I asked Rust for too much
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Building a USB SNES Controller
A few years ago on a trip to Tokyo, we took a day to explore Akihabara. We found a shop that was selling retro gaming stuff and when I saw an old SNES controller for sale I had to buy it.
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A 2024 Plea for Lean Software
This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors. The really short version: the…
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Ditching PaaS: Why I Went Back to Self-Hosting
I had never been a fan of devops/server-admin work. The sheer number of headaches involved in setting up the services, configuring them, automating them, and ensuring their reliability were just annoying and time-consuming. PaaS offerings like Heroku, AWS—and later—Railway, and Render, were appealing options out of…
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Identifying Rust's collect:<Vec<_>>() memory leak footgun
Over the weekend, I was working on a personal Rust project when I ran into an excessive memory usage problem. After an evening of trial and error, I found a workaround to fix the memory usage, but I still didn’t understand how the issue was even possible, so I then spent another evening digging through the source code…
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Htmx and Web Components: A Perfect Match
Web Components are a set of browser APIs that allow us to create custom HTML elements. They are one of the major things that SPA (Single Page Application) frameworks have been giving us for a long time ... HTMX is highly interesting, useful and a promising technology. It simplifies many things and allows us to build…
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Systemd: Enable indefinite service restarts
When a service fails to start up enough times in a row, systemd gives up on it. On servers, this isn’t what I want — in general it’s helpful for automated recovery if daemons are restarted indefinitely. As long as you don’t have circular dependencies between services, all your services will eventually come up after…
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File over app
If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you...
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Why don't schools teach debugging, or, more fundamentally, fundamentals?
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. A story from Dan Luu, from back when he “TA’ed EE 202, a second year class on signals and systems at P…
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White space does matter in C23
Usually in C identifiers are not directly followed by strings. But when U prefixed literals were introduced in C. there still were some rare clashes with existing code. This happened were a macro U…
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Understanding x86_64 Paging
I’ve spent quite a lot of time messing with x86_64 page tables, understanding address translation is not easy and when I started learning about it I felt like a lot of the material out there on how it works was hard for me to wrap my head around. So in this blog post I am going to attempt to provide a kind of “what I…
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Passing nothing is surprisingly difficult
My day job is in browsers and cryptography , not compilers, yet I often find that I need to spend more of my time working through the semantics of programming languages than using them. This post discusses a thorny cross-language issue between C, C++, and Rust. In short:
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Ruby 3.3 on Rails 1.0
Me think, why waste time say lot word, when few word do…2024259 points72 commentsSoftware Engineering details
Hey! I'm Vasiliy Ermolovich or @nashby. Here you'll find some blog posts I write once per 10 years
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Std: Clamp generates less efficient assembly than std:min(max,std:max(min,v))
UPDATE: This blog post has been updated based on feedback from Reddit and Hacker News. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id...
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PIDs: Creating Stable Control in Games
Using a game use-case to motivate and explain PIDs
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Immediate Mode GUI Programming
Articles and programs by Elias Naur
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A lowering strategy for control effects in Rust
The Rust language has incrementally grown a set of patterns to support control-flow effects including error handling, iteration, and asynchronous I/O. In The registers of Rust , boats lays out four aspects of this pattern shared by Rust’s three effects. Today these effects are typically used in isolation, or at most…
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Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…
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When Random Isn't
This post is an anecdote from over a decade ago, of which I lost the actual code. So please forgive me if I do not accurately remember all the details. Some details are also simplified so that anyone that likes computer security can enjoy this article, not just those who have played World of Warcraft (although the…
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Some memories of Niklaus Wirth
January 2024
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Coding Self-Attention, Multi-Head Attention, Cross-Attention, Causal-Attention
This article will teach you about self-attention mechanisms used in transformer architectures and large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and Llama.
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Type information for faster Python C extensions
Update: The paper version of this post is accepted at PLDI SOAP 2024. Take a look at the preprint (PDF).
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Dynamic programming is not black magic
This year’s Advent of Code has been brutal (compare the stats of 2023 with that of 2022, especially day 1 part 1 vs. day 1 part 2). It included a problem to solve with dynamic programming as soon as day 12, which discouraged some people I know. This specific problem was particularly gnarly for Advent […]
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A decade-old Steam bug
Valve has shown to occasionally not act on community feedback and bug reports. A story about a decade old bug.
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Hidden Changes in GPT-4, Uncovered
The tool instructions in this article are not up to date as of 2024-01-12, see this post to learn more about the new tool OpenAI added to block conversations about U.S. elections using function calls.
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Doing First Grade Math in Rust's Type System
MIT student who enjoys performance engineering, compilers, and creating unconventional code
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A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
I work in product growth helping people discover and use great software, currently at SurveyMonkey. In the past I've done it at Prismatic (acq. by LinkedIn), Clara Lending (acq. by Sofi), Right Side Up, Hubstaff. I've also enjoyed consulting with interesting companies like DoorDash, Empower, StitchFix, Calm, Dell…