The Daily Index — Tuesday, May 14, 2024 · TLDR Index

ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

TLDR Web Dev

TLDR Web Dev

WHY PATCHING GLOBALS IS HARMFUL

Patching globals, or modifying existing APIs in a language, can lead to maintenance issues, unpredictable behavior due to conflicting implementations, vendor lock-in, and even slow down the progress of the language itself. These issues arise because patched globals are essentially modifications to code that you don't own, making them difficult to manage and predict. There are often better, more explicit solutions to API design challenges that avoid these issues.

kettanaito.com · 20 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW TO SALVAGE A "MICROSERVICE" SYSTEM BUILT THE WRONG WAY (REDDIT THREAD)

This author is part of a team that built microservices the “wrong way” where everything depends on everything else and thus it's too difficult to make architectural changes. Commenters give their recommendations, such as collapsing the system to an actual monolith if possible and turning remote calls to local calls.

bit.ly

TLDR Web Dev

ASK HN: FOUNDERS WHO OFFER FREE/OS AND PAID SAAS, HOW DO YOU MANAGE YOUR CODE? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Founders share how they manage code for their free and paid SaaS products. Many products use a plug-in architecture, while others have separate codebases for the open-source product versus the paid product.

news.ycombinator.com

TLDR Web Dev

AT SOME POINT, JAVASCRIPT GOT GOOD

JavaScript has changed a lot since 2015, especially thanks to improvements in the ECMAScript specification. Early JavaScript was difficult to work with due to issues like function-scoped variables and callback hell. Modern JavaScript has introduced features like block-scoped variables, arrow functions, promises, and async/await, which makes development much better. Tooling has also gotten better.

jonbeebe.net · 7 min

TLDR Web Dev

HELLO GPT-4O

OpenAI has released GPT-4o, an AI model that can reason across audio, vision, and text in real time. Developers can access the GPT-4o API as a text and vision model. It's 2x faster, half the price, and has 5x higher rate limits compared to GPT-4 Turbo.

bit.ly · 8 min

TLDR Web Dev

INSIDE THE CULT OF THE HASKELL PROGRAMMER

Haskell is a functional programming language with elegant syntax but a steep learning curve. Although not widely adopted for practical programming, Haskell has influenced modern programming languages, with many incorporating its concepts to improve bug prevention, code correctness, and parallel processing capabilities.

wired.com · 4 min

TLDR Web Dev

BINARY SEARCH VS. PROLLY SEARCH

Binary Search is a common search algorithm with logarithmic time complexity, often used on sorted data. Prolly Search is a faster alternative that leverages the uniform distribution of data to make more intelligent guesses than simply dividing the set in half with each iteration. However, Prolly Search is not always applicable because it relies on the assumption of uniform data distribution, and it can regress to linear time complexity in certain cases.

dolthub.com · 7 min

TLDR Web Dev

GPUS GO BRRR

These authors, from Stanford University, focused on optimizing AI's compute usage and developed ThunderKittens, a DSL embedded in CUDA, to write efficient kernels. ThunderKittens simplifies the process of utilizing hardware features like the Tensor Memory Accelerator (TMA) and warp group matrix multiply accumulate (WGMMA) instructions, leading to significant performance improvements in Flash Attention and Based linear attention kernels.

hazyresearch.stanford.edu · 26 min

TLDR Web Dev

AMAZON S3 WILL NO LONGER CHARGE FOR SEVERAL HTTP ERROR CODES

Amazon S3 is changing its billing policy so that bucket owners will no longer be charged for unauthorized requests that return a 403 (Access Denied) error and other codes.

aws.amazon.com · 1 min

TLDR Web Dev

APPLE AND GOOGLE DELIVER SUPPORT FOR UNWANTED TRACKING ALERTS IN IOS AND ANDROID

Apple and Google have partnered to create a specification for Bluetooth tracking devices that will send alerts to both iOS and Android users if an unknown tracker is detected moving with them.

apple.com · 1 min

TLDR Web Dev

COLORANG! A (SLIGHTLY) NEW WAY TO VISUALIZE RGBA COLOR

A color picker that linearly blends RGBA color to a gray value that you can specify on a slider.

pursuitofgamedev.com · 4 min