/Entertaining

Making A PDF That’s Larger Than Germany

- Alex Chan tl;dr: “We’re meant to just accept that a single PDF can only cover about half the area of Germany, and we’re not given any reason why 381 kilometres is the magic limit. I started wondering: has anybody made a PDF this big? How hard would it be? Can you make a PDF that’s even bigger?”

featured in #485

4 Billion If Statements

- Andreas Karlsson tl;dr: "So I went to work to explore this idea of checking if a number is odd or even by only using comparisons to see how well it works in a real world scenario. Since I’m a great believer in performant code I decided to implement this in the C programming language as it’s by far the fastest language on the planet to this day..."

featured in #476

Advent Of Code 2023

- Eric Wastl tl;dr: Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a speed contest, or to challenge each other.

featured in #470

I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars

tl;dr: "Let's start with some background, because it is fucking wild that an inefficiency that took me five minutes to solve in a GUI configuration panel was allowed to persist. We cancelled someone's contract the week before I did this. Someone lost their job because no one could get their act together long enough to click the button I told them to click."

featured in #462

Where Does My Computer Get The Time From?

- Tony Finch tl;dr: “On Friday morning I gave a lightning talk called where does my computer get the time from? The RIPE meeting website has a copy of my slides and a video of the talk; this is a blogified low-res version of the slides with a rough and inexact transcript.”

featured in #454

Wifi Without Internet On A Southwest Flight

- James Vaughan tl;dr: “I was on my way home from Strange Loop, a direct flight from St. Louis to Oakland. It’s a long enough flight that I planned to purchase the $8 internet access and get some work done, but Southwest’s wifi portal wouldn’t accept any form of payment. The web page didn’t give me any helpful error messages, so I opened up my browser’s network dev tools to see if I could figure out what was going wrong.”

featured in #453

A Few Weird Ways Of Displaying Git Hashes

tl;dr: The author explores alternative ways to represent Git hashes beyond the conventional hexadecimal format, experimenting with three unconventional methods: emoji, word and color representation of hashes. The author provides examples of these representations using recent commits from one of their repositories. The post emphasizes the experimental nature of these ideas.

featured in #437

Shamir Secret Sharing

- Max Levchin tl;dr: “This is the story of a catastrophic software bug I briefly introduced into the PayPal codebase that almost cost us the company (or so it seemed, in the moment.) I’ve told this story a handful of times, always swearing the listeners to secrecy, and surprisingly it does not appear to have ever been written down before. 20+ years since the incident, it now appears instructive and a little funny, rather than merely extremely embarrassing.”

featured in #436

How To Be A -10x Engineer

tl;dr: "To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:” (1) Nullify the output of 10 engineers. (2) Create 400 hours of busywork. (3) Create 400 hours of burnout or turnover. And more.

featured in #403

Reverse Engineering A Mysterious UDP Stream In My Hotel

- Gokberk Yaltiraklileo tl;dr: “Hey everyone, I have been staying at a hotel for a while. It’s one of those modern ones with smart TVs and other connected goodies. I got curious and opened Wireshark, as any tinkerer would do.” Gokberk discusses what he found and how he got there.

featured in #393