Initially I wanted to write articles on those two topics separately (mocking time and testing event loops), but during the process I realized that the things I want to talk about are too interrelated: when I need to mock time, it's usually to test some event loop with it, and when I test event loops, typically mocked…
I hadn’t heard of Nam June Paik until I went to his exhibition at Tate Modern a few weeks ago.
One of the first Japanese commercial features to directly address the fear of nuclear holocaust and the implications of the atom bomb, Record of a Living Being, which is better known as I Live in F…
Take a look at some of the new features in the latest Git release.
In this post, we implement a garbage collector that frees memory no longer used by the executables our compiler creates.
This is our most recent work, started and led by Aleksey Charapko . (This is a joint post with him.) You can get the paper at arxiv.org . Th...
The narrative can change, but we must overcome the disinformation and fear that has overtaken the United States.
Last week, I revisited Andrew Kensler's business card raytracer to make it run as fast as possible [1] . It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot in the process. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to revisit Andrew's follow up, the postcard sized pathtracer [2] . I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of that code…
What happens when we get or set an attribute of a Python object? This question is not as simple as it may seem at first. It is true that any...
Pathfinding is one of these topics that usualy baffles game developers. The A* algorithm in particular is poorly understood, and the general belief seems to be that it’s arcane magic.
Listen in on Jane Street’s Ron Minsky as he has conversations with engineers working on everything from clock synchronization to reliable multicast, build systems to reconfigurable hardware. Get a peek at how Jane Street approaches problems, and how those ideas relate to tech more broadly.
Case study for Funkoverse JAWS artwork.
Recently I was digging deeper into Raft , an important algorithm in the field of distributed systems. Raft is a consensus algorithm , meaning that it is designed to facilitate a set of computers agreeing on a state of the world (more on exactly how the state of the world is represented later), even when communications…
As I looked around and realized for the hundredth time that I was surrounded by people exactly like me, something inside me snapped. I downloaded the latest American Community Survey microdata, fired up R and started calculating feverishly.
The Green Deal for Europe should, among other elements, reduce aviation (which is harmful to the climate) and promote alternatives. The activist network Back-on-Track has pointed out five areas of priority, where improvements are needed to get cross-border long-distance trains in shape to provide alternatives to…
A new study from Penn State tracked excess influenza-like illness data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to estimate that the number of early COVID-19 cases in the U.S. may have been more than 80 times greater and doubled nearly twice as fast as originally believed.
Better hiring leads to better work environments, less turnover, and more innovation and productivity. When you understand the limitations and pitfalls of the job interview, you improve your chances of hiring the best possible person for your needs.
It all started as a curiosity in 2015. Now, the whole world is looking into universal basic income to stimulate the economy. The timing of Finland’s basic income experiment results could not have been better. But what can we learn from it when reimagining the post-pandemic economy and society? It...
The conventional wisdom for app subscriptions is to price affordably, like $1.99/month, and hopefully attract lots of subscribers at a low price. Then by having low pricing, fewer will reject the idea of subscriptions, and you’ll make up the difference with volume. But this is the wrong
A comprehensive guide to Fusion for personal use changes — what's changing and what is remaining the same.
Up to yesterday, my laptop was a large 15-inch MacBook Pro. It contains an Intel Kaby Lake processor (3.8 GHz). I just got a brand-new 13-inch 2020 MacBook Pro with Apple's M1 ARM chip (3.2 GHz). How do they compare? I like precise data points. Recently, I have been busy benchmarking number parsing routines where you…
The solution to one of our most challenging privacy issues of today could have the simplest answer.
In 2001, Microsoft's former CEO— Steve Ballmer— was quoted by the online tech news publication, The Register, saying: Linux is a
If you’re lurking on HackerNews, or are interesting in entrepreneurship, you might occasionally bump into something like this Starbucks coffee is $2.45 + taxes. $100/mo is less than a cup of coffee a day. And it’s very tempting — and somehow logical — to consider how much money we might spend without thinking too much…
The behavior of the Windows scheduler changed significantly in Windows 10 2004 (aka, the April 2020 version of Windows), in a way that will break a few applications, and there appears to have been …
