Some Possible Reasons For 8-Bit Byte
- Julia Evans tl;dr: Julia explores the question: why does the x86 architecture use 8-bit bytes? Why not some other size? She evaluates a couple of options: (1) It’s a historical accident, another size - like 4 or 6 or 16 bits - would work just as well. (2) 8 bits is objectively the Best Option for some reason, even if history had played out differently we would still use 8-bit bytes. (3) Mix of 1 & 2.featured in #396
The World's Smallest Hash Table
- Orson Peters 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
Squeezing A Sokoban Game Into 10 Lines Of Code
- Cole Kurashige tl;dr: Although code golfing is an ultimately frivilous endeavor, I had a lot of fun trying to fit as much as I could into my game and I’m pleased with how it turned out… While I don’t expect you to ever make (serious) use of these tips, I hope you liked them.”featured in #392
Image Stacks And iPhone Racks - Building An Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
- Matthew Bryant tl;dr: "There’s an ironic duality to most memes: the more niche they are, the more funny they tend to be… This presented an extremely common problem: I could never find the niche memes I wanted to send folks when I needed them most. Mid-conversation, spur-of-the-moment memes were always impossible to find. Scrolling through hundreds of saved images in my phone is not efficient searching as it turns out, so I decided to try to better solve the problem.”featured in #391
The Technology Behind GitHub’s New Code Search
- Timothy Clem tl;dr: "We were motivated to create our own solution by three things: (1) We’ve got a vision for an entirely new user experience that’s about being able to ask questions of code and get answers through iteratively searching, browsing, navigating, and reading code. (2) We understand that code search is uniquely different from general text search. (3) GitHub’s scale is truly a unique challenge... north of 200 million repositories.featured in #388
Why Does 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004?
- Julia Evans tl;dr: "This is roughly how floating point addition works: (1) Add together the numbers with extra precision (2) Round the result to the nearest floating point number... So let’s use these rules to calculate 0.1 + 0.2. I just learned how floating point addition works yesterday so it’s possible I’ve made some mistakes in this post, but I did get the answers I expected at the end."featured in #388
GPT Is Only Half Of The AI Language Revolution
- Jason Phillips tl;dr: In this post, Slite Engineer Jason Phillips examines AI breakthroughs like GPT, exploring their potential for categorizing, filtering, and processing data. He suggests real-world applications rely more on processing than content generation.featured in #387
Reversing UK Mobile Rail Tickets
tl;dr: "But what data is inside the barcode of a mobile ticket, and how do they work? Could people who aren’t ticket inspectors get the data out of them? It turns out that the answer is a bit more interesting than I initially expected!" The author shows your ticket barcode, which is often written below the code in plain text, might let someone access a surprising amount of detailed tracking information as to where you are and what trains you’re taking.featured in #387
Asynchronous Computing At Meta: Overview And Learnings
- Sayak Kundu Artem Denisov tl;dr: "We have built a platform for serverless asynchronous computing that is provided as a service for other engineering teams. They register asynchronous functions on the platform and then submit workloads for execution via our SDK. The platform executes these workloads in the background on a large fleet of workers and provides additional capabilities such as load balancing, rate limiting, quota management, downstream protection and many others."featured in #387
How We Improved DNS Record Build Speed By More Than 4,000x
- Alex Fattouche tl;dr: "Our network now spans over 270 cities in over 100 countries, interconnecting with more than 10,000 networks globally. According to w3 stats, “Cloudflare is used as a DNS server provider by 15.3% of all the websites.” This means we have an enormous responsibility to serve DNS in the fastest and most reliable way possible."featured in #383