Highly recommended reading for C++ developers: An informal comparison of the three major implementations of std::string (discussed on Reddit and Hacker News), which goes into how std::string is implemented by the 3 major compilers: GCC (libstdc++), MSVC, and Clang (libc++), and what design choices …
Money Stuff: Banks Are Still Where the Money Isn’t talks about a curious phenomenon: a big bank (Barclays Plc) struggling to find the money to lend out for its credit cards, and ends up essentially borrowing money from private equity (Blackstone) to do it. Huh?! Isn’t, like, the entire point …
93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs (discussed on Hacker News) made me laugh, it is the kind of high-quality trolling that the field of computer science could definitely use more of. It is actually a scientific paper accepted by the SIGBOVIK 2019 conference, and that is glorious. In this …
In the news recently: Elon Musk’s US tax bill: $11 billion. Tesla’s: $0. Elon Musk has repeatedly bragged (or, perhaps, complained) that he’ll pay more in federal taxes for 2021 than anyone has ever paid — about $11 billion. But Tesla apparently won’t pay a cent. Tesla may not plan to pay federal …
I’ve referenced the excellent Money Stuff newsletter before, and I continue to absolutely recommend it to anybody with an interest in the world of finance. The most recent article: The FTC Comes for Noncompetes which is particularly relevant for anybody working in the field. Yesterday, the US …
Birds are crazy creatures! In October 2022 a bird with the code name B6 set a new world record that few people outside the field of ornithology noticed. Over the course of 11 days, B6, a young Bar-tailed Godwit, flew from its hatching ground in Alaska to its wintering ground in Tasmania, covering …
Random find of the day: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept” […] So in a mathematical sense it’s kind of obvious. But I didn’t really mean in a mathematical sense, I think this is a pretty good guideline for life also. What I mean is that how fast …
The Verge has a really good – though very long – article on the maintenance of the cables that keep the world connected to the internet: The Cloud Under the Sea. These cables are laid under the seas and oceans, sometimes thousands of meters deep, and this is exactly as vulnerable as it …
I am here to talk to you non-believers about The Wisdom of James Mickens. At least those of you who are software developers or would vaguely identify yourselves as “computer scientists”, whatever that might mean. James Mickens offers his timeless insights for free, because he loves you …
My favorite internet find of the day: Ten weird things you can buy online (and why you would) TLDR, you can buy online: books by the foot ($60 per foot in case you were wondering), for when you want to look intellectual by having filled bookshelves human milk (makes sense) private islands (of …
One of the unpopular opinions I’ve long held in programming is that accessor methods (getters and setters) are a terrible practice. Now that I have found somebody who agrees with me (timestamps 1:13:06 to 1:16:25) I am ready to write about this! This is what I mean (C++ code, but the same …
Have you seen Dune: Part 2 yet? I think it’s well worth watching in the cinema, it’s an extraordinarily good adaptation of Frank Herbert’s book. If you have seen it, you have probably rolled your eyes on the Freemen’s extreme religiosity and felt empathy for Chani as she …
The Heart of Gaming Is the Power Fantasy is an essay on the nature of gaming. I have played computer games since I was a kid, but I have to admit I have never reflected much on what it is that makes games appealing to play… that is, what makes them fun or not-fun. The essay makes a really …
The Silicon Valley is such a weird place. I’ve never been, but from everything I hear, many people and companies there have really strange ideas about the world. Sometimes it’s entertaining, but on some fundamental level, also very sad. The stereotypical example would be something like a …
Do you get the feeling that time goes by so fast? “The days are long, but the years are short” I’ve heard said. It’s a common enough phenomenon. The essay Where All the Time Went has some insights on this that I felt were very note-worthy. Though it was written more in the …
Amazon Ditches ‘Just Walk Out’ Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores, because, as it turns out, it wasn’t actually all that technological: Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The …
Humans Need Not Apply was a YouTube video by CGP Gray published in 2014. It talks about how technological advancements, especially making computers smarter and more able to think and make decisions, will increasingly make humans unnecessary. It was made in time where AI research was still in its …
In the previous part we have started working on our Rust orderbook re-implementation of the C++ original, and defined the types Order and OrderKey<Side>, where Side is a type implementing the OrderbookSide trait: either Bid (for buy orders) or Ask (for sell orders). Defining OrderHandle …
I found the recent Abseil article Performance Tip of the Week #52: Configuration knobs considered harmful to be insightful. Most people, developers included, would generally prefer more flexibility and configurability over less, but as the article points out, configuration options (flags) carry …
The Hunt for the Missing Data Type (discussion on Hacker News) is an article exploring why are graph implementations so rare while graph problems are so common: I see graphs everywhere and use them to analyze all sorts of systems. At the same time, I dread actually using graphs in my code. There is …
In the previous part, we have sketched out the structure of implementing a simple order book in C++, supporting order insertion and efficient cancellation. (Implementing uncrossing, that is, trades when a buy order and a sell order agree on a price, is an exercise left to the reader, as is …
In Thanks FedEx, This is Why We Keep Getting Phished (discussion on Hacker News) the author is playing the game we are probably all used to playing these days upon receiving a text or e-mail asking us to urgently do something or pay: scam or real. I highly recommend reading the article in full, as …
A fairly standard programming problem in the world of trading is building an order book. In this article, I will be showing one particular interesting aspect of this problem, and how to solve it in C++. In the next two parts, we will be trying to implement the same solution in Rust. This is meant to …
You don’t have polyamory, you hate people who write books makes some very good points, in particular highlighting how most people’s ideas (including mine) about polyamory comes from media, which distorts reality almost as a necessity. “They figured out their issues and lived happy …
The Psychopolitics of Trauma by Scott Alexander is a very interesting essay to read. It talks about politics and today’s social and political climate in a way that was new to me and felt extremely reasonable. In fact, it posits an explanation for the feeling of aversion I have always felt …