the arc of software bends towards understanding
In which Mendeley, Software Foundations and Coq are discussed. I was grousing on #haskell-blah one day about how annoying it was to organize all of the papers that I have downloaded (and, of course, not read yet.) When you download a paper off the Internet, it will be named all sorts of tremendously unhelpful things […]
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences is quite a nifty website. Suppose that you’re solving a problem, and you come up with the following sequence of integers: 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 3, 0, 1, 0, 2... and you wonder to yourself: “huh, what’s that sequence?” Well, just type it in and the […]
I’ve been wanting to implement a count-min sketch for some time now; it’s a little less widely known than the bloom filter, a closely related sketch data structure (that is, a probabilistic data structure that approximates answers to certain queries), but it seems like a pretty practical structure and has been used in some interesting […]
This is a bit of a provocative post, and its impressions (I dare not promote them to the level of conclusions) should be taken with the amount of salt found in a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Essentially, I was doing some reading about medieval medicine and was struck by some of the similarities between it and […]
Someone told me it’s all happening at the zoo... I’ve always thought dynamic programming was a pretty crummy name for the practice of storing sub-calculations to be used later. Why not call it table-filling algorithms, because indeed, thinking of a dynamic programming algorithm as one that fills in a table is a quite good way […]
In which the author muses that “semi-formal methods” (that is, non computer-assisted proof writing) should take a more active role in allowing software engineers to communicate with one another. C++0x has a lot of new, whiz-bang features in it, one of which is the atomic operations library. This library has advanced features that enable compiler […]
Hoare logic, despite its mathematical sounding name, is actually a quite practical way of reasoning about programs that most software engineers subconsciously employ in the form of preconditions and postconditions. It explicitly axiomatizes things that are common sense to a programmer: for example, a NOP should not change any conditions, or if a line of […]
What I did for my summer internship at Galois World of algebra quizzes. As a high schooler, I was using concepts from computer science long before I even knew what computer science was. I can recall taking a math quiz—calculators banned—facing a difficult task: the multiplication of large numbers. I was (and still am) very […]
Over the weekend, I took the Greyhound up to Seattle to meet up with some friends. The Greyhound buses was very late: forty-five minutes in the case of the trip up, which meant that I had some time to myself in the Internet-less bus station. I formulated the only obvious course of action: start working […]