Recent content on cole-k
Reddit-The-Company If you don’t know Reddit, it basically is the host of many popular forums. And like any company which encourages you to “come for the cats [and] stay for the empathy,” Reddit seems to be in the business of extracting as much value as it can from said forums without completely destroying them. After all, simply fostering community is not a noble enough goal for…
Note: Forcing dark mode via a plugin will make some pictures ugly (ironic because I do this). Sorry. E-graphs are a cool data structure, but I think that what makes them cool also has the side effect of making them a little inscrutable. This is an e-graph. Does it confuse you? It certainly took me a long time before I understood one. My goal with this post is to Motivate two distinguishing…
If you’re only interested in seeing or playing the game, you can find it on my GitHub. The occasion The Haskell Tiny Game Jam is a game jam which challenges participants to write a video game in Haskell using 10 lines of 80 characters. I happen to love Haskell and code golf (abusing a programming language to produce disgustingly short code for fun) so I decided to enter the Feb ‘23…
I’m Cole Kurashige[1]. I’m a PhD student in UCSD’s Programming Systems group. I started Fall 2022. I graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 2020 and worked for Okta, Inc. in the years between undergraduate and graduate school. Every few years I remember I have a website and poke it, so don’t expect this to be the most up-to-date information on me. Interests (in no particular…
Original post (dated 07-13-2019) Like many people with a website, I am wont to forget that I have one most of the time. Well, I recently remembered. And this time, I have actually done things with this knowledge. I’ve gone and cleaned up my handling of the Project Euler posts, which I had hurriedly taken down when I learned of a change in policy. I also removed some hidden posts that were no…
People who somehow stumble across this website must wonder what motivates me to broadcast into the void. I don’t heavily advertise this website – I just link to it on various social media. As far as I can tell I don’t have a single follower, nor anyone using the RSS feed, which I don’t even know is actually working since I don’t use RSS. I can only assume that the…
Prelude (07/13/2019) This was a WIP post dated August 2nd, 2017 that lived on my Project Euler solutions page. I took it down to comply with their request not to post solutions on the public web. Since this post offers no solutions, I’m putting it back up. I had intentions to make a longer guide to J (as well as to finish this guide), but life got in the way (read: I got distracted).
This past semester, I hosted two puzzle hunts at Harvey Mudd. I’ve written about the hunts on Medium. I wrote seven posts in total. The first post gives an overview of the two puzzle hunts. The second post is a more detailed recap of the longer puzzle hunt I hosted. The remaining posts are summaries of some of the puzzles that were a part of the longer puzzle hunt. You can find those in the…
The Raconteurs’ third album, Help Us Stranger, came out two weeks ago. Pitchfork was quick to review, giving it a mediocre 6.4. I am not here to contest this rating. I quite agree that Help Us Stranger is overall a disappointment, and I’m not the world’s biggest Raconteurs fan myself. But I take issue with what motivated the 6.4. I know that music is subjective, but a lot of things in the review…
HackMIT Hackathons are always a blast, and HackMIT was no exception, but it was a different experience than most. All of the other hackathon projects I’ve worked on have been about taking a few things that our team is somewhat familiar with and combining them, but with HackMIT we were learning new technologies from scratch. That was still fun, don’t get me wrong, but it was a different…
How do you say that? I’m used to hearing my last name mispronounced. One of my earliest memories from first grade is on the first week of school when the principal announced me as Student of the Week.[1] After she said my last name, I requested the microphone from her and pronounced it correctly for the assembled student body. I get a lot of “Could you say your last name for me?
Prelude (07/13/2019) I am keeping this post up for legacy reasons after Project Euler has requested that solutions to their problems be kept off of the public web. I had over 50 commented solutions posted on my website, so I’m sort of sad to have to take them away. Most links here are broken, except the common J code link, which I reuploaded as it has no solutions. Project Euler solutions in…
Fish? This essay serves as an explanation to what the language ><> is and what makes it so cool. I give an overview of in what ways it is esoteric and then walk through a sample program just to cement how interesting it is. I hope you like it as much as I do. An esoteric language The programming language ><>[1] (spoken as “fish”) is what is known as an esoteric language.
It was about time for a new website My old website[1] had long been broken (albeit only in a minor way) by some sort of update to HTML. In its defense, it wasn’t a particularly bad website, especially for one that I hastily threw together for a hackathon application. But I had quite a few qualms with it, the biggest being that it was completely hand-written HTML and CSS: no frameworks,…