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Knuth changes his mind on Bernoulli number B_1
(I thank Yoshiyuki Kotani for this identity. We'll be able to use the same idea again in 2024 and 2027!)
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,218 posts.
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The many flavors of hashing
About the many types of hash functions, their use-cases, dos and don'ts, with suggestions for currently accepted algorithms.
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Build Unix, Not Uber
I spent the last three weeks in Seoul, partly visiting family I hadn’t seen in years and partly taking a vacation from my usual work in my usual city in my usual context of life. While I haven’t been able to work much at all, I spent my subway rides and waiting-in-line times reading the Singularity Sky series of…
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Kitsault, Canada’s $50M 1980s ghost town
It sounds made up. In the wilderness of British Columbia, a two hour drive from any town with cell reception, sits a ghost town. Not only a ghost town, but a ghost town that was built for $50…
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Timsort (2019)
Timsort: A very fast , O(n log n), stable sorting algorithm built for the real world — not constructed in academia. Timsort is a sorting algorithm that is efficient for real-world data and not created in an academic laboratory. Tim Peters created Timsort for the Python programming language in 2001.
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Color.js Released
It has taken Lea and I far too long – there is always something more that really should be added, always some conversion that really needs an authoritive set of data to validate our code against – but we finally decided, time to actually release Color.js .
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Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)
It’s quite popular to bash the Windows Registry in non-technical or lightly technical terms. I’ve just spent a couple of weeks reverse engineering the binary format completely for our h…
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Phrases in computing that might need retiring
The upcoming issue of the SICPers newsletter is all about phrases that were introduced to computing to mean one thing, but seem to get used in practice to mean another. This annoys purists, pedants, and historians: it also annoys the kind of software engineer who dives into the literature to see how ideas were…
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Buttery Smooth “10fps” (2020)
The GIF (/ɡɪf/ GHIF) file is unfortunately the most popular and widespread form of exchanging animated content across the internet. Oh crap here’s one now A Pokémon I 3D modeled and animated called Shuppet, in 50fps When I am making animations, with the intent of ultimately becoming a GIF file on the internet, I…
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Overview of Consistency Levels in Database Systems
Database systems typically give users the ability to trade off correctness for performance. We have spent the previous two posts in this s...
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Is the Kalman filter just a low-pass filter?
Exploring the relationship between Kalman filtering and optimal frequency domain filtering.
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Rebellion at DataRobot over insider stock sales
What happens when executives are allowed to secretly sell stock at a company that is doing poorly? And what can founders learn from this incident?
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Air Support in a Backpack: The Switchblade
In March 2022, it was reported that the United States was sending over some Switchblades to Ukraine.
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Nobody optimizes happiness
People don’t seem to try very hard to make themselves happier. Why not?
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S3 isn't getting cheaper
Clayton Christensen famously demonstrated the Innovator's Dilemma by using data from the hard drive industry in the 1980s. At every point, companies failed to make the switch from 8-inch drives, to 5-inch drives, to 3...
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That time when I accidentally social engineered myself to a film set
I spent the last week in Toronto in the Cpp North conference . It was so much fun just to hang around with people after such a long pause.My...
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Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)
(This is another of my speculative pieces and nothing to do with Star Wars. This one is for an older trilogy.) Old Tom Bombadil. Possibly the least liked character in The Lord of the Rings. A childish figure so disliked by fans of the book that few object to his absence from all adaptations of the…
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Rust is actually portable
Gautham's Blog
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Do data-driven companies win?
Some gut-based judgements on the effectiveness of data.
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Flipping until you are lost
Start with any triangulation of a convex polygon, and then repeatedly choose a random diagonal and flip it, replacing the two triangles it borders with two d...
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How to create a Python package in 2022
How do you create a Python package? How do you set up automated testing and code coverage? How do you publish the package? That's what this article...
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ICMP, Ping, and Traceroute – What I wish I was taught (2020)
I wanted to write a post and do a bit of a deepdive into ICMP, ping and traceroute. I’ve found that having a good networking foundation has been a tremendous…
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What’s the maximum size of a DNS response?
Everybody knows a DNS response needs to fit into a 512 byte UDP packet, right? But suppose it doesn't fit...
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Alpha: A translation of Genesis 1
1. An advent: ancient archangels architect abstract astronomy and arid asteroids. 2. All asteroids are amorphous and absent; And a...