#568 – April 07, 2024
Over the past 5,000 years, tables have evolved from simple grids to highly structured displays of data
The Design Philosophy of Great Tables
17 minutes by Rich Iannone and Michael Chow
We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about tables. Tables—like plots—are crucial as a last step toward presenting information. There is surprising sophistication and nuance in designing effective tables. Over the past 5,000 years, they’ve evolved from simple grids to highly structured displays of data. Although we argue that the mid-1900s served as a high point, the popularization and wider accessibility of computing seemingly brought us back to the simple, ancient times.
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What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world
4 minutes by Dan Goodin
Malicious updates made to a ubiquitous tool were a few weeks away from going mainstream.
What Happens on GitLab When You do git push?
15 minutes by Li Zhennan
Ever wondered how Git and GitLab operate under the hood? Grab your favorite IDE and join me on an exploratory journey into the mechanics of these tools.
What’s in a Name?
2 minutes
Have you ever read an identifier only to realize later it doesn’t do what you expected? Or had to read the implementation in order to understand an interface? These indirections eat up our cognitive bandwidth and make our work more difficult.
FIFO is Better than LRU: the Power of Lazy Promotion and Quick Demotion
14 minutes by by Juncheng Yang
Historically FIFO-based algorithms are thought to be less efficient (having higher miss ratios) than LRU-based algorithms. In this blog, we introduce two techniques, lazy promotion, which promotes objects only at eviction time, and quick demotion, which removes most new objects quickly. We will show that
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