/Orson Peters

The World's Smallest Hash Table tl;dr: Orson tackles an Advent of Code, which he optimizes “completely beyond the point of reason” but also contains a useful technique, showing us how to store a small lookup table with small elements as a constant, indexed using shifts.

featured in #395


Magical Fibonacci Formulae tl;dr: "Wow. Somehow the simple expression x/(1−x−x2) contains’ the entire Fibonacci sequence..." Orson explains how.

featured in #388


Ordering Numbers, How Hard Can It Be? tl;dr: "From challenging a variety of people to write a correct implementation of is\_less\_eq, no one gets it right on their first try. And that’s after already explicitly being told that the challenge is to do it correctly for all inputs. I quote the Python standard library: “comparison is pretty much a nightmare.”"

featured in #385