/Entertaining

My Favorite Math Jokes

- Tanya Khovanova tl;dr: “For many years, I have been collecting math jokes and posting them on my website. I have more than 400 jokes there. In this paper, which is an extended version of my talk at the G4G15, I would like to present 66 of them.”

featured in #497

The Self-Rendering Eval Shirt

- Eric Simons tl;dr: The free t-shirts companies give away to developers are everywhere and, with a few exceptions, most are pretty boring: usually just a logo on a t-shirt. In this post, see how StackBlitz’s co-founder broke this mold with a t-shirt design that incorporated the StackBlitz logo constructed with \*actually valid\* JavaScript code that is the source code of the image itself.

featured in #496

The Self-Rendering Eval Shirt

- Eric Simons tl;dr: The free t-shirts companies give away to developers are everywhere and, with a few exceptions, most are pretty boring: usually just a logo on a t-shirt. In this post, see how StackBlitz’s co-founder broke this mold with a t-shirt design that incorporated the StackBlitz logo constructed with \*actually valid\* JavaScript code that is the source code of the image itself.

featured in #491

Making A PDF That’s Larger Than Germany

- Alex Chan tl;dr: “We’re meant to just accept that a single PDF can only cover about half the area of Germany, and we’re not given any reason why 381 kilometres is the magic limit. I started wondering: has anybody made a PDF this big? How hard would it be? Can you make a PDF that’s even bigger?”

featured in #485

4 Billion If Statements

- Andreas Karlsson tl;dr: "So I went to work to explore this idea of checking if a number is odd or even by only using comparisons to see how well it works in a real world scenario. Since I’m a great believer in performant code I decided to implement this in the C programming language as it’s by far the fastest language on the planet to this day..."

featured in #476

Advent Of Code 2023

- Eric Wastl tl;dr: Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a speed contest, or to challenge each other.

featured in #470

I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars

tl;dr: "Let's start with some background, because it is fucking wild that an inefficiency that took me five minutes to solve in a GUI configuration panel was allowed to persist. We cancelled someone's contract the week before I did this. Someone lost their job because no one could get their act together long enough to click the button I told them to click."

featured in #462

Where Does My Computer Get The Time From?

- Tony Finch tl;dr: “On Friday morning I gave a lightning talk called where does my computer get the time from? The RIPE meeting website has a copy of my slides and a video of the talk; this is a blogified low-res version of the slides with a rough and inexact transcript.”

featured in #454

Wifi Without Internet On A Southwest Flight

- James Vaughan tl;dr: “I was on my way home from Strange Loop, a direct flight from St. Louis to Oakland. It’s a long enough flight that I planned to purchase the $8 internet access and get some work done, but Southwest’s wifi portal wouldn’t accept any form of payment. The web page didn’t give me any helpful error messages, so I opened up my browser’s network dev tools to see if I could figure out what was going wrong.”

featured in #453

A Few Weird Ways Of Displaying Git Hashes

tl;dr: The author explores alternative ways to represent Git hashes beyond the conventional hexadecimal format, experimenting with three unconventional methods: emoji, word and color representation of hashes. The author provides examples of these representations using recent commits from one of their repositories. The post emphasizes the experimental nature of these ideas.

featured in #437