Unexpected Chinese Remainder Theorem
Last week, we had an incident at work. Both the bug itself and the debugging process were mildly interesting, and I’ll describe both briefly below, and discu...
Recent Posts
A Tale of Two Zeros
One day I came across some code that looked like this (paraphrased):
Building Multiplayer Minesweeper: Easy If You Know How
I spent the past few weekends building a multiplayer minesweeper game on the web. It’s now live, so get a nerdy friend and try it out! In this post, I’ll lis...
Searching for Sets: Jaccard Index and MinHash
Here’s a well-written intro to audio fingerprinting. One part of the article contains a clever trick that seems generally useful and interesting to think abo...
Precisely Compare Ints and Floats
Here’s a seemingly trivial task that I ran into recently - given a 64 bit int i and a 64 bit floating point f, how can we tell which one is larger?
Paper Reading: Efficient Path Profiling
Recently I’ve been going through CS 6120 from Cornell (compilers), and one of the papers listed in the course was quite interesting, namely Efficient Path Pr...
Random Heap Updates Are Cheap
A while ago I encountered an algorithmic challenge at work. Basically, the idea is that we have a bag of numbers, and we’d like to be able to update each num...
Building an AVL Tree From a Sorted Sequence in One Pass
Recently I came across the function Map.of_increasing_sequence in the base library of OCaml. It might sound like a very simple and common function, but the i...