I saw a math puzzle the other day on Hacker News. It reads as follows: Two numbers are chosen randomly, both are positive integers smaller than 100. Sandy is told the sum of the numbers, while Peter is told the product of the numbers. Then, this dialog occurs between Sandy and Peter: Peter: I don’t know the numbers…
I’ve been a maintainer of asdf for about 6 years now. Most of my work these last several years has been fixing bugs, writing automated tests …
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022176 points45 commentscited by 10History & Retro Computing details
In this three-part series (I, II, III) we’re going to be bowing to reader demand and taking a close look at the nuts and bolts of maintaining an army in the field. In our last series, after all, w…
A lot of modern cryptography builds on insights from number theory, which has been studied for centuries.
Take a look at this: This is a triangulation of a set of random points, such that all the points are connected to one another, all of the faces are triangles, and the edges include the convex hull of the points. I would like to claim that this is not a very “good” triangulation. This algorithm tends to produce lots of…
After that first Firebrand of an article on Application Binary Interface (ABI) Stability, I’m not sure anyone expected this to be the title of the next one, huh? It seems especially bad,
A few thoughts you're free to ignore
I've been interested in games programming since I started learning programming as a teenager more than 25 years ago (gasp!) I started with Qbasic and Gorillas.bas, but never understood the code. Of course, I didn't get anywhere at the time, beyond very basic games. I wrote a simple Shoot
A tutorial for getting on Mastodon
If you are dealing with text in a computer, you need to know about encodings. Period. Yes, even if you are just sending emails. Even if you are just receiving emails. You don't need to understand every last detail, but you must at least know what this whole "encoding" thing is about. And the good news first: while the…
Fans, an active cooling element, move air in a system. Heat must be removed from the site of its production, and from the system as a whole. A fan increases heat convection with surrounding air via airflow. Air is at its highest pressure immediately in front of the fan, and at lowest pressure immediately behind it.
The internet is littered with explanations of how transistors work. Most of them don't really explain anything.
How big should your queue be, and what should you do when it fills up? Many times, we implement or even deploy a networking system before w...
Composite indexes aka multi-column indexes are about 10x faster than index merges. In Postgres, the gap is larger than in MySQL because Postgres doesn’t support index-only scans for queries that involve index merges.
Ever since its introduction in the 2017 paper, Attention is All You Need, the Transformer model architecture has taken the deep-learning world by storm. Initially introduced for machine translation, it has become the tool of choice for a wide range of domains, including text, audio, video, and others. Transformers…
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Stock Market
-h --help -help help --? -? ????
Crazed Tik-Toker's Tirade Against University Professor Raises Fact v. Opinion Issue
Collection of pitfalls, tips & tricks, and workarounds for Java development on an Apple M1 processor (ARM64): Testcontainers, Docker, Testing
Apple's feedback system is fundamentally broken, and they don't seem to care.
A storytelling guide to starting k8s
Nithin Bekal's blog about programming - Ruby, Rails, Vim, Elixir.
My fascination with PCMCIA cards was created out of “necessity”. Most of my retro computing interest revolves around networking, and I wanted something that could natively attach to modern Wifi networks without the need to maintain an old linksys router just for my retro computers. There are many ways to do this, I…
