3301
A legal and moral question: The crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 (2021)
The story of how McDonnell Douglas’s corporate culture led to the deaths of 346 people in one of the deadliest plane crashes of all time.
3302
Ruby might be faster than you think
I saw a project a couple weeks back which allows writing and running Crystal methods inline inside a Ruby file. It’s a neat project, and I don’t want to take away from it but something in the README example looked off to me. require 'crystalruby' require 'benchmark' module Fibonnaci crystalize [n:
3303
ChibiHash: Small, Fast 64 bit hash function
Update Nov 30: I've added a version 2, which makes the benchmarks and design overview section in this article outdated. See the github repo for updated benchmarks.
3304
My simple knowledge management and time tracking system
I am using a very simple system for remembering commands and procedures, and for tracking what I work on. I have two plain text files called notes.txt and worktime.txt. In the notes file, I write d…
3305
Integrated assembler improvements in LLVM 19
Within the LLVM project, MC is a library responsible for handling assembly, disassembly, and object file formats. Intro to the LLVM MC Project, which was written back in 2010, remains a good source to understand the high-level structures. In the latest release cycle, substantial effort has been dedicated to refining…
3306
Pick Your Distributed Poison
One of the hardest things for people to understand with distributed systems is that eventual consistency is the same thing as eventual inconsistency. The very...
3307
Implementing the Goodfellow GANs paper
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), discovered by Ian Goodfellow in 2014, were an early method in the area of generative AI. I will focus on image generation as set out in the paper Generative Adversarial Nets 1 . This paper is the focal point of the post, I will guide you through the implementation of the paper…
3308
How much memory does a graph take?
We need a fast way to query multiple potentially large sets of data on-demand at interactive speeds. Sometimes the easiest solution to a hard problem is to build the right tool for the job.
3309
Penrose Mazes (2020)
Mazes are typically constructed on regular grids: square, triangular, hexagonal, etc. But what if you generate a maze on top of a Penrose tiling, which is guaranteed to be irregular? (It is an aperiodic tiling .) The resulting mazes have a very characteristic appearance: they are filled with circles and stars, but the…
3310
The theory of concatenative combinators (2007)
This article attempts to outline, in informal terms, a new theory of combinators, related to the theory of Combinatory Logic pioneered by Moses Schonfinkel, Haskell Curry, and others in the 1930s. Although not essential, an understanding of the classical theory of combinators may be helpful (see the links at the…
3311
Type information for faster Python C extensions
Update: The paper version of this post is accepted at PLDI SOAP 2024. Take a look at the preprint (PDF).
3312
Basic MetaProgramming in Zig
Getting started with Zig's meta programming capabilities by leveraging a few useful functions
3313
Grade inflation at UC Riverside, and institutional pressures for easier grading
Recent news reports have highlighted grade inflation at elite universities: Harvard gave 79% As in 2020-2021, as did Yale in 2022-2023 , compared to 67% in 2010-2011. At Harvard, the average GPA has risen from 2.55 in 1950 to 3.05 in 1975 to 3.36 in 1995 to 3.80 now. At Brown, 67% of grades were As in 2020-2021, 10%…
3314
Tailwind Isn't for Me
I think the folks building Tailwind are talented and nice people. But at a pure technical level, I simply don’t like Tailwind. Whoever it was built for, it was not built for me.
3315
Move semantics in Rust, C++, and Hylo
I just finished reading the paper Borrow checking Hylo . It outlines the basic design of Hylo . Hylo is an early-stage programming language, but unlike other contenders of C++, it provides memory safety like rust. Specifically it merges rust’s borrow checking ideas into the framework of moveable value semantics (MVS)…
3316
Types are a basic tool of software design (2018)
Static or dynamic, a program's design is written in its types.
3317
Enum class improvements for C++17, C++20 and C++23
The evolution of the C++ language continues to bring powerful features that enhance code safety, readability, and maintainability. Among these improvements, we got changes and additions to enum class functionalities across C++17, C++20, and C++23. In this blog post, we’ll explore these advancements, focusing on…
3318
Why Postgres RDS didn't work for us
Background
3319
Why Python's integer division floors (2010)
I was asked (again) today to explain why integer division in Python returns the floor of the result instead of truncating towards zero like...
3320
Rotation curves: still flat after a million light-years
That rotation curves become flat at large radii is one of the most famous results in extragalactic astronomy. This had been established by Vera Rubin and her collaborators by the late 1970s. There …
3321
Fighting Infomania: Why 80% of Your Reading Is a Waste of Time (2016)
Author, writer, and creator sharing insights on learning, writing, philosophy, entrepreneurship, and more.
3322
Reflections on Luck and Skill from the Part Time Poker Grind
In the early hours of May 13th, 2024 and after about sixteen hours of play over two days, I achieved one of my poker dreams and outlasted 773 entrants in the RunGood Poker Series $800 No Limit Hold’em Main Event hosted at Graton Casino and Resort to claim the outright win and top prize of $85,780.
3323
The importance of local development
Efficient software development benefits from local development, it enables faster iteration, better debugging and ensures consistency between local and production environments.
3324
Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)
How I learnt Elm (its good parts and bad) by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React.
3325
Orange Site Hit
I know I'm not alone in having a relationship with the orange site that is... weird. I generally dislike the culture there, it's almost impossible to read any of the comments without being frustrated about the industry I work in or am adjacent to and some of the people who inhabit it; but as a link aggregator of stuff…
3326
The Algorithm Behind Jim Simons's Success
Reflections on a Wall Street legend.
3327
Why I left Google
How I became the focus of a mass ritual against generative AI, and what I did about it.
3328
TOTP Codes in the Terminal
The demise of Authy desktop has brought about a number of changes, probably the one of which I most appreciate is a mobile app which lets me edit codes: with 2FAS I can edit labels on codes, and I’...
3329
The asymmetry of nudges
Answering the age-old question: why do bad decisions happen to good companies?
3330
How Mihoyo's monetization works
You open your favourite social media site. You see the same discussions come up again.