Where do top scientists come from? And what do taxes have to do with it?
I was reading this article recently, which talks about “Where star scientists choose to locate: the impact of US state taxes” It’s a summary of a paper about “the effect of state taxes on the...
View ArticleFinding Floating Point Numbers for Exact Math
For the second time in my career, I ran into a problem where it’s actually useful to know how floating point numbers work. (first time was here) The problem is that sometimes you want floating point...
View ArticleA Summary of the Important Points in Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Capital in the Twenty First Century by Thomas Piketty was widely recognized as a very important book when it came out in 2013. Yet somehow now, in 2018, I rarely encounter people who have learned the...
View ArticleA new fast hash table in response to Google’s new fast hash table
Hi, I wrote my new favorite hash table. This came about because last year I wrote the fastest hash table (I still make that claim) and this year one of the organizers of the C++Now conference asked me...
View ArticleFibonacci Hashing: The Optimization that the World Forgot (or: a Better...
I recently posted a blog post about a new hash table, and whenever I do something like that, I learn at least one new thing from my comments. In my last comment section Rich Geldreich talks about his...
View ArticleA Programmers Take on “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”
Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a collection of five lectures that Italo Calvino was going to give in 1985. Unfortunately he passed away before he was able to deliver the lectures. Because of that...
View ArticleOn a Future of Screen-less Computers
The current problem with computers was well articulated in the piece The Machine Stops by the late Oliver Sacks: I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or...
View ArticleTreasure Hunting Systems Found in the History of Video Games
A treasure hunting system is a system that unexpectedly puts out really good stuff. Proper treasure that makes people an enormous amount of money. An example is the Warcraft III modding community which...
View ArticleA New Algorithm for Controlled Randomness
I don’t know if this problem has a proper name, but in game development you usually don’t want truly random numbers. I’ve seen the solution named a “pseudo random distribution” but “pseudo random”...
View ArticleWhat Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre
I replayed Warcraft III recently and was looking for other games I could play in the same genre. Turns out that outside of StarCraft 2, there are no recent games that are anywhere near as good. What...
View ArticleMeasuring Mutexes, Spinlocks and how Bad the Linux Scheduler Really is
This blog post is one of those things that just blew up. From a tiny observation at work about odd behaviors of spinlocks I spent months trying to find good benchmarks, (still not entirely successful)...
View ArticleWhy Video Game AI does not Use Machine Learning
I used to be an AI programmer working on video games, and I’m currently trying to learn machine learning. As part of this I find myself having to repeatedly explain why video games don’t use machine...
View ArticleA New Strategy Genre Grows Up: Survival Chaos, my New Favorite Game
I’ve had an obsession recently with a mod for Warcraft 3. It’s called Survival Chaos. I want to talk about it because it’s part of a genre of strategy games that hasn’t had a big success yet, and this...
View ArticleA New York History of Covid-19, Written at the Half-Way Point
You have to write these things down while you still remember them. I was already beginning to forget that there was a toilet paper shortage. Similarly right now the popular thing is to point out that...
View ArticleThe Covid-Shutdowns are Actually a Great Civics Lesson
Currently much of the country is shut down to stop the spread of the coronavirus and there is very active debate about how soon we should open up again. Some people say as soon as possible, others are...
View ArticleConcepts for the Current US Mess
An unforeseen disaster is never the consequence of a single factor, but rather is like a whirlwind, a point of cyclonic depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multiplicity...
View ArticlePartial Scaling – How to do Half a Multiplication
Programmers have a habit of over-generalizing things, and so it happened that I found myself writing more generalized versions of rotation, translation and scaling, the three most common operations...
View ArticleOn Modern Hardware the Min-Max Heap beats a Binary Heap
The heap is a data structure that I use all the time and that others somehow use rarely. (I once had a coworker tell me that he knew some code was mine because it used a heap) Recently I was writing...
View ArticleUsing TLA+ in the Real World to Understand a Glibc Bug
TLA+ is a formal specification language that you can use to verify programs. It’s different from other formal verification systems in that it’s very pragmatic. Instead of writing proofs, it works...
View ArticleLooking for Voter Fraud (in old elections) with Data Visualization
The 2020 US election is finally over, and all the election excitement of the last week reminded me of something I had been meaning to look into: Sergey Shpilkin’s data visualizations that clearly show...
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