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Async Queue – One of my favorite programming interview questions

For the past 7+ years, I've been conducting a programming interview that has been a true personal favorite of mine. It was passed down to me from good friends (Jeremy Kaplan and Carl Sverre, and it was the latter whom I believe invented it). This interview has probably been given by us between 500-1000 times across different companies, and upon googling for "async queue interview", I see tons of results. So, it's probably fine for me to blog about it. My main goal with this blog post is to disc

Building the Rust Compiler with GCC

Bootstrapping Rust with GCC If you know one thing about me, it is that I love working on the Rust compiler. Some people kayak, travel or play guitar - and I stare at assembly, trying to figure out what I broke. This summer, I am taking on quite a large task: bootstrapping the Rust compiler using `cg_gcc` What does that mean? "bootstrapping" is simply a name given to the Rust compiler build process. So, what I am really trying to do is build a Rust compiler, without using LLVM - and using GCC

The messy reality of SIMD (vector) functions

We’ve discussed SIMD and vectorization extensively on this blog, and it was only a matter of time before SIMD (or vector) functions came up. In this post, we explore what SIMD functions are, when they are useful, and how to declare and use them effectively. A SIMD function is a function that processes more than one piece of data. Take for example a mathematical sin function: double sin(double angle); This function takes one double and returns one double. The vector version that processes four

What's the difference between named functions and arrow functions in JavaScript?

Arrow functions (also known as ‘rocket’ functions) are concise and convenient. However, they have subtle differences compared to function declarations and function expressions. So how do you know which one to use, and when? Function declarations and function statements We have (at least) three ways of creating functions in JavaScript. The first is the function declaration. This binds a function to a given name. It looks something like this:1 1 I’ve used String.toLowercase() here, partly for b

Couchers is officially out of beta

A new chapter: Couchers is officially out of Beta! Quick summary: we are out of Beta and into version 1, we're releasing a new strategy around safe & active community instead of bashing our competitors, a fancy redesigned landing page, and a bunch of new features to make core couch surfing functionality better! Share the platform with your friends and let's grow the community together! We are super excited to share that Couchers is today finally out of the Beta phase with our version 1 (v1) la

Couchers is officially out of Beta

A new chapter: Couchers is officially out of Beta! Quick summary: we are out of Beta and into version 1, we're releasing a new strategy around safe & active community instead of bashing our competitors, a fancy redesigned landing page, and a bunch of new features to make core couch surfing functionality better! Share the platform with your friends and let's grow the community together! We are super excited to share that Couchers is today finally out of the Beta phase with our version 1 (v1) la

Catalio Capital closes over $400M Fund IV

In Brief Venture capital firm Catalio Capital Management announced today the closing of its more than $400 million Fund IV, as first reported by Bloomberg. The fund will continue the firm’s thesis of backing healthcare and biotechnology companies. The firm was founded in 2020 and has made more than 100 investments, according to PitchBook. Catalio’s Fund IV, in particular, has backed 16 companies already, including the diagnostics company PinkDx and the drug discovery company Superluminal Medic

Senate removes ban on state AI regulations from Trump's tax bill

Jarmo Piironen/Getty Images Until now, the Trump administration's tax bill -- also called its "big, beautiful bill," which passed in the Senate on Tuesday -- included a rule that would prevent states from enforcing their own AI legislation for five years, and would withhold up to $500 million in funding for AI infrastructure if states don't comply. On Tuesday, a day into a "vote-o-rama" that began Monday in an effort to pass Trump's tax bill before the July 4 holiday, the Senate voted 99 to on

14 Million People Could Die in Next 5 Years Due to USAID Cuts, Study Finds

Elon Musk’s wood-chipping of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is poised to leave piles of bodies behind in its wake, a new study suggests. Scientists have calculated that recent funding cuts to USAID could lead to millions of preventable deaths worldwide over the next half-decade. An international group of researchers conducted the study, published Monday in the Lancet. They estimated that USAID funding in developing countries has helped save dozens of millions of

Trump's big, revised bill will slash AI funding for states that regulate AI

ANDREY DENISYUK/Getty The Trump administration's tax bill -- also called its "big, beautiful bill," which is facing a vote today -- includes a rule that would prevent states from enforcing their own AI legislation for five years, and would withhold up to $500 million in funding for AI infrastructure if states don't comply. Over the weekend, senators also added exemptions for state laws targeting unfair or deceptive practices and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The initial version of the ru

Asynchronous Error Handling Is Hard

(Ed. note: This article was originally published on The CUDA Handbook blog on November 2, 2023.) Every API designer has struggled with the question of how best to propagate errors to their callers, since before the term “API” was invented. Even decades ago (say 30+ years), interface designers knew to separate the error return from the payload, in functions that return other results to their caller. Since it is sometimes useful to know what not to do: My favorite example of an antipattern in th

Senate pits AI regulation against state funding

ANDREY DENISYUK/Getty The Trump administration's tax bill -- also called its "big, beautiful bill," which is facing a vote today -- includes a rule that would prevent states from enforcing their own AI legislation for five years, and would withhold up to $500 million in funding for AI infrastructure if states don't comply. Over the weekend, senators also added exemptions for state laws targeting unfair or deceptive practices and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The initial version of the ru

NIH budget cuts affect research funding beyond US borders

Rory de Vries, an associate professor of virology in the Netherlands, was lifting weights at the gym when he noticed a WhatsApp message from his research partners at Columbia University, telling him his research funding had been cancelled. The next day he received the official email: “Hi Rory, Columbia has received a termination notice for this contract, including all subcontracts,” it stated. “Unfortunately, we must advise you to immediately stop work and cease incurring charges on this subcont

NativeJIT: A C++ expression –> x64 JIT (2018)

NativeJIT NativeJIT is an open-source cross-platform library for high-performance just-in-time compilation of expressions involving C data structures. The compiler is light weight and fast and it takes no dependencies beyond the standard C++ runtime. It runs on Linux, OSX, and Windows. The generated code is optimized with particular attention paid to register allocation. The compiler was developed by the Bing team for use in the Bing search engine. One important use is scoring documents contai

A glob of 99M-year-old amber trapped a zombie fungus erupting from a fly

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. CNN — A glob of 99 million-year-old amber has preserved an ancient fly in horror show fashion: with the mushroom-like fruiting body of zombie fungus bursting forth from its head. The insect, along with a second specimen of a young ant infected with a similar fungus, are two of the oldest examples of a bizarre natural phenomenon that involves fungal p

Amber insect fossils reveal "zombie" fungi likely lived alongside dinosaurs

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. CNN — A glob of 99 million-year-old amber has preserved an ancient fly in horror show fashion: with the mushroom-like fruiting body of zombie fungus bursting forth from its head. The insect, along with a second specimen of a young ant infected with a similar fungus, are two of the oldest examples of a bizarre natural phenomenon that involves fungal p

NativeJIT: A C++ expression –> x64 JIT

NativeJIT NativeJIT is an open-source cross-platform library for high-performance just-in-time compilation of expressions involving C data structures. The compiler is light weight and fast and it takes no dependencies beyond the standard C++ runtime. It runs on Linux, OSX, and Windows. The generated code is optimized with particular attention paid to register allocation. The compiler was developed by the Bing team for use in the Bing search engine. One important use is scoring documents contai

Error handling in Rust

On Error Handling in Rust The current standard for error handling, when writing a crate, is to define one error enum per module, or one for the whole crate that covers all error cases that the module or crate can possibly produce, and each public function that returns a Result will use said error enum. This means, that a function will return an error enum, containing error variants that the function cannot even produce. If you match on this error enum, you will have to manually distinguish whi

Bloom Filters by Example

Bloom Filters by Example A Bloom filter is a data structure designed to tell you, rapidly and memory-efficiently, whether an element is present in a set. The price paid for this efficiency is that a Bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure: it tells us that the element either definitely is not in the set or may be in the set. The base data structure of a Bloom filter is a Bit Vector. Here's a small one we'll use to demonstrate: Each empty cell in that table represents a bit, and the nu

Show HN: AGL a toy language that compiles to Go

AGL (AnotherGoLang) Description AGL is a language that compiles to Go. It uses Go's syntax, in fact its lexer/parser is a fork of the original Go implementation, with a few modifications The main differences are: Functions return only a single value. This makes it possible to use types like Option[T] and Result[T] , and to support automatic error propagation via an operator. and , and to support automatic error propagation via an operator. To make returning multiple values easy, a Tuple ty

Topics: fmt func int main return

How the Senate's ban on state AI regulation imperils internet access

ANDREY DENISYUK/Getty The Trump administration's tax bill -- also called its "big, beautiful bill" -- which rounds up key pieces of the president's agenda, also includes a rule that would prevent states from enforcing their own AI legislation for 10 years, if passed. After an initial budget hiccup, Republican senators successfully amended the rule to comply with budgetary requirements by adding that states trying to enforce AI regulations would not receive federal broadband funding. Here's why

Rust in the Linux kernel: part 2

How to write Rust in the kernel: part 2 [LWN subscriber-only content] In 2023, Fujita Tomonori wrote a Rust version of the existing driver for the Asix AX88796B embedded Ethernet controller. At slightly more than 100 lines, it's about as simple as a driver can be, and therefore is a useful touchstone for the differences between writing Rust and C in the kernel. Looking at the Rust syntax, types, and APIs used by the driver and contrasting them with the C version will help illustrate those diffe

Jesse Draper’s Halogen Ventures closes $30M Fund III to focus on ‘future of family’

In Brief Halogen Ventures closed a $30 million Fund III to invest in early-stage startups building in the “future of family,” as reported first by Fortune. The firm was founded in 2015 by Jesse Draper, the daughter of famed venture capitalist Tim Draper. She explained to Fortune that the fund will focus on the physical and financial health of households. Startups in the care economy have received more investor interest in the past few years after the pandemic, which exacerbated childcare and

Startups Weekly: Tech and the law

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Before this newsletter takes a break for the Fourth of July next week, here are the startup stories and funding rounds that caught our eye over the last few days, which have been quite busy. Most interesting startup stories from the week Image Credits:SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty Images This week brought us lawsuit updates, M&As, and a

A Lisp adventure on the calm waters of the dead C (2021)

A Lisp adventure on the calm waters of the dead C I will use a C-like language throughout, with substantial liberties in its syntax, and I will try to answer "what if" and "how" questions regarding the implementation of some new features that actually cannot be implemented in C due to its limitations. I will examine and highlight those limitations. The scope of this exercise is to better understand Lisp and the power of the abstractions it offers over and above what most languages have, even th

34 Best Family Board Games (2025): Catan, Ticket to Ride, Codenames

More Family Board Games Photograph: Simon Hill There are so many family board games. Here are a few more we liked. Dorfromantik: The Duel for $39: Based on the videogame Dorfromantik, which spawned a cooperative board game, this spin-off pits you against another player as you draw tiles to build a landscape and try to complete tasks along the way. With identical sets in red and blue, it’s all about who builds a better environment to satisfy their villagers and score the most points. Play time

Now Google’s Gemini AI is ready to fill in those empty cells in your spreadsheet

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Google is launching a new AI function in Sheets to help you generate text to fill out parts of your spreadsheet. The feature, powered by Google Gemini, can reference specific cells to create text, summarize information, or categorize your data. In the example shared by Google, you can use the new AI function to generate and tailor copy for an adver

Unreal Amber Fossils Show ‘Last of Us’ Zombie Fungus Terrorizing Bugs During the Cretaceous

In the video game The Last of Us and its spin-off HBO series, humans fight to survive against cordyceps, a parasitic fungus that turns its hosts into zombies. While the infections are wildly dramatized in both the game and the show, these fungi aren’t mere science fiction. In fact, some species have been around since the age of the dinosaurs, a new study suggests. An international team of researchers led by Yuhui Zhuang, a doctoral student of paleontology at China’s Yunnan University, recently

100,000 Mattresses Sold on Amazon Are Being Recalled Due to Fire Risk. Here’s What You Should Know

You'll want to check the tags if you purchased a mattress from Amazon within the past couple of years. According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC), around 100,000 Crayan mattresses are being recalled due to flammability risks as of June 18, 2025. Here’s how to check if you have one of these mattresses and how to receive a refund. What products are being recalled? The recall involves Crayan Mattresses’ 10-inch and 12-inch beds (twin, full, queen and king sizes), sold on Amazon

Primitive Kolmogorov complexity is computable

/ 5 min read This post is mostly AI generated, of course with significant guidance, feedback, iteration and some edits from me. There was little for me to gain writing this myself, but I felt it needed to be written down regardless. Kolmogorov complexity and Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference offer formal, theoretical solutions to measuring complexity and forming predictions. However, both are uncomputable, a fact that is often treated as having significant implications in computabilit