Bisection (software engineering) Updated 2025-07-16
One of the Holiest age old debugging techniques!
The cool thing about bisection is that it is a brainless process: unlike when using a debugger, you don't have to understand anything about the system, and it incredibly narrows down the problem cause for you. Not having to think is great!
for loop Updated 2025-07-16
The for loop is a subcase of the while loop.
One theoretical motivation for its existence is that it has the fundamental property that we are immediately certain it will terminate, unlike while loops with arbitrary conditions.
Primitive recursive functions are the complexity class that divides those two.
Regulate the fuck out of advertising Updated 2025-07-16
It should be illegal to give someone money to advertise your product.
We should just use tags and upvote-based algorithms.
TODO find Sergey Brin quote bout advertising being a form of perverting search engine ranking neutrality. In other words, there are neutral metrics to what people find good, like links and upvotes. And then advertising is a way to pervert that to someone's profit.
Sometimes Ciro Santilli thinks advertising should be on-subscription only, but that is too restrictive, e.g. imagine the local business owner who wears a t-shirt of their business.
Video 1.
What Do I Think When I Think About Advertising by Daniele Grosso
. Source.
HIV Updated 2025-07-16
Reverse transcriptase Updated 2025-07-16
Converts RNA to DNA, i.e. the inverse of transcription. Found in viruses such as Retrovirus, which includes e.g. HIV.
Square Updated 2025-07-16
Synchrotron Updated 2025-07-16
Most important application: produce X-rays for X-ray crystallography.
Note however that the big experiments at CERN, like the Large Hadron Collider, are also synchrotrons.
BitcoinStrings.com Updated 2025-07-16
bitcoinstrings.com has all strings -n20 strings, we can obtain the whole thing and clean it up a bit with:
wget -O all.html https://bitcoinstrings.com/all
cp all.html all-recode.html
recode html..ascii all-recode.html
awk '!seen[$0]++' all-recode.html > all-uniq.html
awk to skip the gazillion "mined by message" repeats.
A lot of in that website stuff appears to be cut up at the 20 mark. As shown in Force of Will, this is possibly because they didn't use -w in strings -n20, and the text after the newlines was less than 20 characters.
That website can be replicated by downloading the Bitcoin blockchain locally, then:
cd .bitcoin/blocks
for f in blk*.dat; do strings -n20 -w $f | awk '!seen[$0]++' > ${f%.dat}.txt; done
tail +n1 *.txt
Remove most of the binary crap:
head -n-1 *.txt | grep -e '[. ]' | grep -iv 'mined by' | less

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