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Safety: A comparaison between Rust, C++ and Go
Memory safety is a hot topic, but what do we mean by it?
My customized Wim Hof breathing method
The Official Homepage of Nyan Cat!
I miss the programmable web (2021)
In some ways, we've taken a few steps back from a programmable web—two things I miss: bookmarklets and user scripts. Imagine having a bookmarked shortcut to do complex things like taking screenshots or saving a PDF. O...
The Fourth Operation: What Comes After Exponentiation
Tetration -- repeated exponentiation a fractional number of times.
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!)
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.
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…
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…
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.
Build your own web framework
Historical tutorial for building a web framework on Vercel, updated with current Vercel Functions and Routing Middleware terminology.
Scientists discover new “origins of life” chemical reactions
The reaction generates amino acids and orotic acid, the building blocks of proteins and DNA.
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 .
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…
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…
A complete guide to creating actually useful courses
Free guide to creating an online course: pick a topic, validate it, teach with practice, and pre-launch before you film. No email.
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…
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...
Is the Kalman filter just a low-pass filter?
Exploring the relationship between Kalman filtering and optimal frequency domain filtering.
Apple Reports Third Quarter Results
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2022 third quarter ended June 25, 2022.
WebContainers are now supported in Firefox on desktop and Android
WebContainers are now supported on Firefox for desktop and mobile as a result of StackBlitz and Mozilla collaboration! 🥳
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?
EdgeDB 2.0
Today we're excited to announce the release of EdgeDB 2.0, the latest version of our graph-relational database.
Air Support in a Backpack: The Switchblade
In March 2022, it was reported that the United States was sending over some Switchblades to Ukraine.
Nobody optimizes happiness
People don’t seem to try very hard to make themselves happier. Why not?