Twilight Dragon Services Branch prediction This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC . How many of you use branches in your code? Could yo... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Sattolo's algorithm I recently had a problem where part of the solution was to do a series of pointer accesses that would walk around a chunk of memory in pseudo-random order. Sattolo's algorithm provides a solution to t... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Terminal latency There’s a great MSR demo from 2012 that shows the effect of latency on the experience of using a tablet . If you don’t want to watch the three minute video, they basically created a device which could... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services The widely cited studies on mouse vs. keyboard efficiency are completely bogus Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog whic... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Startup options v. cash I often talk to startups that claim that their compensation package has a higher expected value than the equivalent package at a place like Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Snapchat. One thing I don’t un... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services How web bloat impacts users with slow connections A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, b... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services HN: the good parts HN comments are terrible . On any topic I’m informed about , the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong . Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the ... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Programming book recommendations and anti-recommendations There are a lot of “12 CS books every programmer must read” lists floating around out there. That's nonsense. The field is too broad for almost any topic to be required reading for all programmers, an... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Hiring and the market for lemons Joel Spolsky has a classic blog post on "Finding Great Developers" where he popularized the meme that great developers are impossible to find, a corollary of which is that if you can find someone, the... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services I could do that in a weekend! I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Is dev compensation bimodal? Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement , to the point where compensation rivals and maybe even exceeds compensation in traditio... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services How I learned to program Tavish Armstrong has a great document where he describes how and when he learned the programming skills he has . I like this idea because I've found that the paths that people take to get into program... 2 jan 2025