/Deep Dive

The Technology Behind GitHub’s New Code Search

- Timothy Clem tl;dr: "We were motivated to create our own solution by three things: (1) We’ve got a vision for an entirely new user experience that’s about being able to ask questions of code and get answers through iteratively searching, browsing, navigating, and reading code. (2) We understand that code search is uniquely different from general text search. (3) GitHub’s scale is truly a unique challenge... north of 200 million repositories.

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Why Does 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004?

- Julia Evans tl;dr: "This is roughly how floating point addition works: (1) Add together the numbers with extra precision (2) Round the result to the nearest floating point number... So let’s use these rules to calculate 0.1 + 0.2. I just learned how floating point addition works yesterday so it’s possible I’ve made some mistakes in this post, but I did get the answers I expected at the end."

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GPT Is Only Half Of The AI Language Revolution

- Jason Phillips tl;dr: In this post, Slite Engineer Jason Phillips examines AI breakthroughs like GPT, exploring their potential for categorizing, filtering, and processing data. He suggests real-world applications rely more on processing than content generation.

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Reversing UK Mobile Rail Tickets

tl;dr: "But what data is inside the barcode of a mobile ticket, and how do they work? Could people who aren’t ticket inspectors get the data out of them? It turns out that the answer is a bit more interesting than I initially expected!" The author shows your ticket barcode, which is often written below the code in plain text, might let someone access a surprising amount of detailed tracking information as to where you are and what trains you’re taking.

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Asynchronous Computing At Meta: Overview And Learnings

- Sayak Kundu Artem Denisov tl;dr: "We have built a platform for serverless asynchronous computing that is provided as a service for other engineering teams. They register asynchronous functions on the platform and then submit workloads for execution via our SDK. The platform executes these workloads in the background on a large fleet of workers and provides additional capabilities such as load balancing, rate limiting, quota management, downstream protection and many others."

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How We Improved DNS Record Build Speed By More Than 4,000x

- Alex Fattouche tl;dr: "Our network now spans over 270 cities in over 100 countries, interconnecting with more than 10,000 networks globally. According to w3 stats, “Cloudflare is used as a DNS server provider by 15.3% of all the websites.” This means we have an enormous responsibility to serve DNS in the fastest and most reliable way possible."

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Hello, PNG!

- David Buchanan tl;dr: Davi discusses the mechanics of how PNGs functions:" I'm writing this article to fulfil my role as a PNG evangelist, spreading the joy of good-enough lossless image compression to every corner of the internet... I'll be referencing the Working Draft of the PNG Specification released in October 2022, but every feature I mention here should still be present in the 1.0 spec."

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Hello World Under The Microscope

tl;dr: "We will trace the execution path of the "Hello World" micro-program written in Python and run on Windows, starting from a single call to the high-level print function, through the subsequent levels of abstraction of the interpreter, operating system and graphics drivers, and ending with the display of the corresponding pixels on the screen. As it turns out, this path in itself is neither simple nor short, but definitely fascinating."

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Rendering Doom With Emojis

- Bruno Croci tl;dr: "Back in 2020, I had an idea of a simple project to render doom using emojis because of some other doom renderer I saw on Twitter. I decided to take it as a weekend project, and although it took me around a week and a lot of bad code, it works and it’s actually pretty interesting. I don’t think anybody wants to play the game like that, but it certainly looks cool."

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How To Build A Digital Wallet In Less Than A Day

tl;dr: Building fintech products is hard. But with a few shortcuts, you can build a functional app in less than a day. Download our eBook and learn how to use our simple APIs to launch new products that support multiple payment methods, track and reconciles payments, and record balances in real time.

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