#401 The Big Little Guide to Message Queues

this week's favorite

A guide to the fundamental concepts that underlie message queues, and how they apply to popular queueing systems available today.

Castlevania III Password Algorithm

This article explains the mechanism Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse uses to save and restore game state through the medium of passwords.

We need tool support for keyset pagination

Did you know pagination with offset is very troublesome but easy to avoid? Offset instructs the databases skip the first N results of a query. However, the database must still fetch these rows from the disk and bring them in order before it can send the following ones.

Evolution of tree data structures for indexing: more exciting than it sounds

Whenever we speak about indexes, especially in PostgreSQL context, there is a lot to talk about: B-tree, Hash, GiST, SP-GiST, GIN, BRIN, RUM. But what if I tell you that even the first item in this list alone hiding astonishing number of interesting details and years of research? In this blog post I’ll try to prove this statement, and we will be concerned mostly with B-tree as a data structure.

How the Slowest Computer Programs Illuminate Math’s Fundamental Limits

The goal of the “busy beaver” game is to find the longest-running computer program. Its pursuit has surprising connections to some of the most profound questions and concepts in mathematics.

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