#241 – December 10, 2017
You can only become a great developer by putting the effort in. Imagine for a moment — You can’t become fit physically by reading a lot about fitness. You actually need to go to the gym and put the hours and sweat in! Same concept applies for coding as well.
Bitcoin mining on a 55 year old IBM 1401 mainframe: 80 seconds per hash
Could an IBM mainframe from the 1960s mine Bitcoin? The idea seemed crazy, so I decided to find out. I implemented the Bitcoin hash algorithm in assembly code for the IBM 1401 and tested it on a working vintage mainframe. It turns out that this computer could mine, but so slowly it would take more than the lifetime of the universe to successfully mine a block. While modern hardware can compute billions of hashes per second, the 1401 takes 80 seconds to compute a single hash. This illustrates the improvement of computer performance in the past decades, most famously described by Moore's Law.
Introduction to logic programming with Prolog
In this post, I am going to provide a short introduction to the language and its essential features. After reading the post, you should be able to write simple programs in Prolog and understand the language’s underlying primary principles.
For someone like me, who has only had some programming experience in Python, the syntax of R feels alienating initially. However, I believe it’s just a matter of time before adapting to the unique logicality of a new language. And indeed, the grammar of R flows more naturally to me after having to practice for a while, and I began to grasp its kind of remarkable beauty, that has captivated the heart of countless statisticians throughout the years.
Writing a Simple Linux Kernel Module
Linux provides a powerful and expansive API for applications, but sometimes that’s not enough. Interacting with a piece of hardware or conducting operations that require accessed to privileged information in the system require a kernel module.