/Algo

The Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm Explained Very Clearly

- Robert Heaton tl;dr: "Wavefunction Collapse is a very independent-minded algorithm, and needs almost no outside help or instruction. You feed it an example of the vibe you’re going for, and it figures everything else out for itself. Despite this self-sufficiency, it is surprisingly simple. It doesn’t use any neural networks, random forests, or anything else that sounds like machine learning. This makes it very clean and intuitive once you get the idea."

featured in #376

Cracking A Compression Algorithm!

tl;dr: "The first thing I did was to create a sort of “assembly simulator” – I ported the assembly steps line-by-line out of the disassembly and into a C# program. Why do this? At the time, I was a beginner with assembly, so this exercise served two purposes: firstly, it helped me become more familiar with the disassembly; secondly, it gave me a program I could run that I knew for a fact would match what the assembly code was doing."

featured in #361

Lessons Learned from Algorithmic Impact Assessments in Practice

tl;dr: "Understanding algorithmic impact is critical to building a platform that serves hundreds of millions of listeners and creators every day. Our approach includes a combination of centralized and distributed efforts, which drives adoption of best practices across the entire organization — from researchers and data scientists to the engineer pushing the code."

featured in #358

How Do One-Time Passwords Work? 

- Serge Zaitsev tl;dr: "That’s just 16 lines of code! If you call totp() function passing it your secret key – you should get a 6-digit number that matches the one in the Google Authenticator"

featured in #344

Pricing At Lyft

- Yanqiao Wang tl;dr: "In this blog post, we discuss the rideshare pricing system architectural design, modeling approaches and potential future iterations of Lyft’s pricing engine to illustrate how we tackle price optimization to achieve Lyft’s long-term mission."

featured in #342

The Many Flavors Of Hashing

- Ciprian Dorin Craciun tl;dr: "Very few hashing algorithms are usable in more than a couple of situations. Even worse, using the wrong algorithm will lead in the best case scenario to performance problems, but in the worst case scenario to security issues and even financial loss. Thus, knowing which algorithm to pick for which application is crucial."

featured in #340

Real World Recommendation System - Part 1

- Nikhil Garg tl;dr: "FAANG and other top tech companies have independently converged on a common architecture for production grade recommendation systems." This architecture is domain / vertical agnostic and can power all sorts of applications — from e-commerce and feeds to search, notifications, etc... Nikhil starts from the basics, explains nuances and describes this universal architecture.

featured in #310

Introducing Swift Async Algorithms

- Tony Parker tl;dr: Part of Swift’s move toward safe, simple, and performant asynchronous programming, Swift have launched a package of algorithms, which has 3 main goals: (1) Integration with async/await. (2) Provide a home for time-based algorithms. (3) Be cross-platform and open source.

featured in #305

Understanding Layout Algorithms

- Josh Comeau tl;dr: "The key realization I had is that CSS is so much more than a collection of properties. It's a constellation of inter-connected layout algorithms. Each algorithm is a complex system with its own rules and secret mechanisms." Josh looks at how this new lens can help make sense of what's happening in CSS. And use that lens to "solve a surprisingly-common mystery."

featured in #304

Algorithms For Decision Making

- Mykel Kochenderfer Tim Wheeler Kyle Wray tl;dr: "This book provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty. We cover a wide variety of topics related to decision making, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them."

featured in #299