A BBC navigation bar component broke depending on the external monitor
Recently, my team and I fixed an absolutely bizarre bug that only one person in the team could reproduce. And to make it even weirder, she was only able to reproduce the issue when using her work laptop at home; it worked fine with the same laptop in the office. So what was the bug? […]
The Skyline algorithm for packing 2D rectangles
Publication: 2024-11-17 Packing 2D rectangles into bigger fixed-size rectangles is a need for most multimedia projects. In GPU programming, changing textures (“binding”) is expensive. Thus, when rendering text, you don’t want to have one texture per glyph. Instead, it is desirable to pack the glyphs in a single texture, called the “atlas”. In 2D-based games, […]
The most helpful charity isn’t what you think
How to help thousands per dollar Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. —Proverbs 31:8 (I think this is one of the most important articles I’ve ever written, so I’d appreciate if you could like and share it! Thanks!) Imagine that you came across 1,500 shrimp about to […]
Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted
CNN — Two undersea internet cables in the Baltic Sea have been suddenly disrupted, according to local telecommunications companies, amid fresh warnings of possible Russian interference with global undersea infrastructure. A communications cable between Lithuania and Sweden was cut on Sunday morning around 10:00 a.m. local time, a spokesperson from telecommunications company Telia Lithuania confirmed […]
Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis
Bhutan, the tiny kingdom that introduced Gross National Happiness to the world, has a problem: young people are leaving the country in record numbers. The country boasts free health care, free education, a rising life expectancy and an economy that’s grown over the last 30 years — still, people are leaving. Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay […]
Nothing-up-my-sleeve number
In cryptography, nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers are any numbers which, by their construction, are above suspicion of hidden properties. They are used in creating cryptographic functions such as hashes and ciphers. These algorithms often need randomized constants for mixing or initialization purposes. The cryptographer may wish to pick these values in a way that demonstrates the constants […]
Writes Large Correct Programs (2008)
I had a conversation yesterday with someone who said he needed to hire a computer scientist. I replied that actually he needed to hire someone who could program, and that not all computer scientists could program. He disagreed, but I stood by my statement. I’ve known too many people with computer science degrees, even advanced degrees, who […]
Show HN: Documind – Open-source AI tool to turn documents into structured data
documind is an advanced document processing tool that leverages AI to extract structured data from PDFs. It is built to handle PDF conversions, extract relevant information, and format results as specified by customizable schemas. Converts PDFs to images for detailed AI processing. Uses OpenAI’s API to extract and structure information. Allows users to specify extraction schemas […]
CPython’s Garbage Collector and Its Impact on Application Performance
A while back I published a detailed code walkthrough of CPython’s GC implementation, but there was a need for a higher level explanation of the overall memory management mechanism of CPython without discussing the code. This article fills that gap. It provides a detailed overview of the overall memory management mechanism in CPython. The main […]
Stack Analyser: detect technologies used inside a repo
{ “id”: “44xNl6ZWgpp1”, “name”: “flatten”, “path”: [“/”], “tech”: null, “edges”: [], “inComponent”: null, “techs”: [], “languages”: {}, “dependencies”: [], “childs”: [ { “id”: “XAPpH2jgrRQq”, “name”: “@fake/api”, “path”: [ “pkgs/api/package.json” ], “tech”: null, “edges”: [ { “target”: “0ijEqmU6TTVP”, “read”: true, “write”: true } ], “inComponent”: null, “childs”: [], “techs”: [ “datadog”, “fastify”, “nodejs”, “prisma”, “typescript” ], […]