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Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)
I’m a keen user of Emacs and Org mode for a variety of tasks, including note taking, generating documents for exporting to LaTeX, Word, or html. creating blog posts (notably for this blog, us…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
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Lisp Query Notation (LQN)
Query language and terminal utility for transforming various data formats
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Demystifying the regular expression that checks if a number is prime (2016)
Ever wondered how the ^.?$|^(..+?)\1+$ regular expression can tell you if a number is not prime? In this blog post you'll learn how and why it works. Code examples in Java, JavaScript, Python and Perl are provided.
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Probability-generating functions
I have long struggled with understanding what probability-generating functions are and how to intuit them. There were two pieces of the puzzle missing for me, and we’ll go through both in this article.
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The Dual Nature of Events in Event-Driven Architecture
On Software Architecture, Programming Languages,…2024112 points63 commentsSoftware Engineering details
Given that events play such a central role in event-driven architecture, there’s an astonishing lack of agreement on what should be contained in an event. This may be rooted in the fact that, depending on your perspective, events fulfill different purposes.
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Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart
Building software is hard. Oftentimes things that seem like they should be simple end up being way more complicated when you get into the details. ( OK, maybe this isn’t specific to software. )
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Sets, types and type checking
My currently understanding of types
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The carefulness knob
A play in one act Dramatis personae EM, an engineering manager TL, the tech lead for the team X, an engineering manager from a different team Scene 1: A meeting room in an office. The walls are ado…
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Lessons learned from a successful Rust rewrite
I have written about my on-going rewrite-it-to-Rust effort at work: 1 , 2 , 3 . And now it's finished, meaning it's 100% Rust and 0% C++ - the public C API has not changed, just the implementation, one function at time until the end. Let's have a look back at what worked, what didn't, and what can be done about it.
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Classic 3D videogame shadow techniques
Towards the end of Wim Wenders’s excellent Perfect Days , the protagonist Hirayama is drinking beer under a bridge after he has seen a Businessman courting his crush. Suddenly the Businessman joins him under the bridge. As it turns out, things aren’t actually that simple but the point is their conversation takes them…
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Eighteen Years of ABI Stability
It has been eighteen years of libcurl ABI stability.
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Model Predictive Control in the Browser with WebAssembly
wrenfold is a framework for converting symbolic mathematical expressions (written in Python) into generated numerical code in other languages (C++, Rust, Python). It aims to bridge the gap between prototyping of functions in expressive symbolic form, and performant production code. wrenfold is particularly relevant to…
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How I write code using Cursor
A personal review of Cursor, an LLM-powered coding tool.
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What's New in POSIX 2024
In the 1950s, computers did not really interoperate. ARPANET has not yet happened (that would become a thing in the 60s), and every operating system was typically tied to the hardware that was meant to run on. Most communication actually happened over telephone, and no company was more present in that space than the…
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HTML Form Validation is underused
HTML Forms have powerful validation mechanisms, but they are heavily underused. In fact, not many people even know much about them. Is this because of some flaw in their design? Let’s explore.
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Improving Xwayland window resizing
One of the quickest ways to determine whether particular application runs using Xwayland is to resize one of its windows and see how it behaves, for example
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On Good Software Engineers
I set out to find a simple definition that would help managers frame the fundamental things they expect from software engineers.
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There is no such thing as a global method in Ruby
What Ruby’s top-level methods actually are, who they belong to and how they are namespaced
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A comparison of Rust’s borrow checker to the one in C#
OK, so C# doesn’t share the Rust concept of “borrowing,” so it wouldn’t technically be correct to call this “borrow checking,” but in practice when people talk about “Rust’s borrow checker” they’re talking about all of the static analysis Rust does to ensure memory safety, for which I think this qualifies.
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We shrunk our Javascript monorepo git size
We really did this! We work in a very large Javascript monorepo at Microsoft we colloquially call 1JS. Using some new changes to the git client it went from 178GB to 5GB.
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Fundamentals of Radiance Cascades
A deep-dive into the fundamental concepts/ideas behind Radiance Cascades.
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Detecting when LLMs are uncertain
A deep dive into a new reasoning technique called Entropix.
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Unsafe Rust is harder than C
Or: The Most Expensive Linked List I’ve Ever Written
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Notes on the new Claude analysis JavaScript code execution tool
Anthropic released a new feature for their Claude.ai consumer-facing chat bot interface today which they’re calling “the analysis tool”. It’s their answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Code Interpreter mode: Claude can …
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Zero or Sign Extend
A while back I had to deal with a bit-packed format that contained a list of integer values encoded in one of a pre-defined sets of bit widths, where both the allowed bit widths and the signed-ness…
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Async Rust in Three Parts
Async/await, or "async IO", is a new-ish Rust added async/await in 2019. For comparison, C# added it in 2012, Python in 2015, JS in 2017, and C++ in 2020. language feature that lets our programs do more than one thing at a time. It's sort of an alternative to multithreading, though Rust programs often use both…
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Probably pay attention to tokenizers
Last week I was helping a friend of mine to get one of his new apps off the ground. I can’t speak much about it at the moment, other than like most apps nowadays it has some AI sprinkled over it. Ok, maybe a bit maybe more just a bit – depends on the way you look at it, I suppose. There is a Retrieval-augmented…
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TLA from First Principles
Building an intuition for the mathematics behind the "TLA" in "TLA+"
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What happens when you make a move in lichess.org?
Dive deep into the open-source architecture of Lichess.org to understand the technical processes behind making a move in a game.