In this post I explain a little about how to use Java’s Vector APIs, attempt to explain how they turn out fast, and then use them to implement a sorting algorithm 3x faster than Arrays.sort . I then explain some problems I found, and how I resolved them. Supporting code is published here . I’m an occasional reader of Daniel Lemire’s blog . Many of his posts follow a standard pattern, where he…
Building distributed databases is very difficult. There are lots of clever ideas you can put into a distributed database, but making the ideas work well together in a real system can be very challenging because different decompositions of the same problem can massively affect how difficult it is to solve, and bugs are typically both subtle and hard to detect. This is especially problematic as the…
Everyone knows that regular expressions (at least in the theoretical sense) have almost immediate limits on what they can recognise, though this is not always realised by users . The problem is that the presented proofs of languages that are not regular are typically those that are easily provable. This is because It is easy to present a simple use of the pumping lemma in a 1 hour lecture than…
If all goes well, this site will eventually contain a whole wealth of informative, useful and (by and large) correct information. If all goes well, you’ll want to read this. At the moment, there’s nothing here. Sorry.