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Time is state Imagine I put an ordinary ticking quartz clock in an empty room. I walk in, and ten minutes later I walk out with two photograph prints.1 In the 1st one, the second hand is pointing at the top of the clock, in the 2nd it's pointing at the bottom. Are these two copies of the same photo, or are they two different pictures? There's no trick here, the answer is "different photos". Since the clock looks different, time must have passed between the two. More formally, we can represent the clock as a state vector of (hours, minutes, seconds). Since the two pictures have different state vectors, they must represent different photos. Now I repeat the process and come out with two prints, both showing the same time. Are these two copies of the same photo or two different photos? It's possible for the pictures to be different but there's no way to be certain. I could have taken the two photos half a second apart so that time passed but the clock didn't tick yet. There's no...
a year ago

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Many Hard Leetcode Problems are Easy Constraint Problems

In my first interview out of college I was asked the change counter problem: Given a set of coin denominations, find the minimum number of coins required to make change for a given number. IE for USA coinage and 37 cents, the minimum number is four (quarter, dime, 2 pennies). I implemented the simple greedy algorithm and immediately fell into the trap of the question: the greedy algorithm only works for "well-behaved" denominations. If the coin values were [10, 9, 1], then making 37 cents would take 10 coins in the greedy algorithm but only 4 coins optimally (10+9+9+9). The "smart" answer is to use a dynamic programming algorithm, which I didn't know how to do. So I failed the interview. But you only need dynamic programming if you're writing your own algorithm. It's really easy if you throw it into a constraint solver like MiniZinc and call it a day. int: total; array[int] of int: values = [10, 9, 1]; array[index_set(values)] of var 0..: coins; constraint sum (c in index_set(coins)) (coins[c] * values[c]) == total; solve minimize sum(coins); You can try this online here. It'll give you a prompt to put in total and then give you successively-better solutions: coins = [0, 0, 37]; ---------- coins = [0, 1, 28]; ---------- coins = [0, 2, 19]; ---------- coins = [0, 3, 10]; ---------- coins = [0, 4, 1]; ---------- coins = [1, 3, 0]; ---------- Lots of similar interview questions are this kind of mathematical optimization problem, where we have to find the maximum or minimum of a function corresponding to constraints. They're hard in programming languages because programming languages are too low-level. They are also exactly the problems that constraint solvers were designed to solve. Hard leetcode problems are easy constraint problems.1 Here I'm using MiniZinc, but you could just as easily use Z3 or OR-Tools or whatever your favorite generalized solver is. More examples This was a question in a different interview (which I thankfully passed): Given a list of stock prices through the day, find maximum profit you can get by buying one stock and selling one stock later. It's easy to do in O(n^2) time, or if you are clever, you can do it in O(n). Or you could be not clever at all and just write it as a constraint problem: array[int] of int: prices = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8]; var int: buy; var int: sell; var int: profit = prices[sell] - prices[buy]; constraint sell > buy; constraint profit > 0; solve maximize profit; Reminder, link to trying it online here. While working at that job, one interview question we tested out was: Given a list, determine if three numbers in that list can be added or subtracted to give 0? This is a satisfaction problem, not a constraint problem: we don't need the "best answer", any answer will do. We eventually decided against it for being too tricky for the engineers we were targeting. But it's not tricky in a solver; include "globals.mzn"; array[int] of int: numbers = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8]; array[index_set(numbers)] of var {0, -1, 1}: choices; constraint sum(n in index_set(numbers)) (numbers[n] * choices[n]) = 0; constraint count(choices, -1) + count(choices, 1) = 3; solve satisfy; Okay, one last one, a problem I saw last year at Chipy AlgoSIG. Basically they pick some leetcode problems and we all do them. I failed to solve this one: Given an array of integers heights representing the histogram's bar height where the width of each bar is 1, return the area of the largest rectangle in the histogram. The "proper" solution is a tricky thing involving tracking lots of bookkeeping states, which you can completely bypass by expressing it as constraints: array[int] of int: numbers = [2,1,5,6,2,3]; var 1..length(numbers): x; var 1..length(numbers): dx; var 1..: y; constraint x + dx <= length(numbers); constraint forall (i in x..(x+dx)) (y <= numbers[i]); var int: area = (dx+1)*y; solve maximize area; output ["(\(x)->\(x+dx))*\(y) = \(area)"] There's even a way to automatically visualize the solution (using vis_geost_2d), but I didn't feel like figuring it out in time for the newsletter. Is this better? Now if I actually brought these questions to an interview the interviewee could ruin my day by asking "what's the runtime complexity?" Constraint solvers runtimes are unpredictable and almost always than an ideal bespoke algorithm because they are more expressive, in what I refer to as the capability/tractability tradeoff. But even so, they'll do way better than a bad bespoke algorithm, and I'm not experienced enough in handwriting algorithms to consistently beat a solver. The real advantage of solvers, though, is how well they handle new constraints. Take the stock picking problem above. I can write an O(n²) algorithm in a few minutes and the O(n) algorithm if you give me some time to think. Now change the problem to Maximize the profit by buying and selling up to max_sales stocks, but you can only buy or sell one stock at a given time and you can only hold up to max_hold stocks at a time? That's a way harder problem to write even an inefficient algorithm for! While the constraint problem is only a tiny bit more complicated: include "globals.mzn"; int: max_sales = 3; int: max_hold = 2; array[int] of int: prices = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8]; array [1..max_sales] of var int: buy; array [1..max_sales] of var int: sell; array [index_set(prices)] of var 0..max_hold: stocks_held; var int: profit = sum(s in 1..max_sales) (prices[sell[s]] - prices[buy[s]]); constraint forall (s in 1..max_sales) (sell[s] > buy[s]); constraint profit > 0; constraint forall(i in index_set(prices)) (stocks_held[i] = (count(s in 1..max_sales) (buy[s] <= i) - count(s in 1..max_sales) (sell[s] <= i))); constraint alldifferent(buy ++ sell); solve maximize profit; output ["buy at \(buy)\n", "sell at \(sell)\n", "for \(profit)"]; Most constraint solving examples online are puzzles, like Sudoku or "SEND + MORE = MONEY". Solving leetcode problems would be a more interesting demonstration. And you get more interesting opportunities to teach optimizations, like symmetry breaking. Because my dad will email me if I don't explain this: "leetcode" is slang for "tricky algorithmic interview questions that have little-to-no relevance in the actual job you're interviewing for." It's from leetcode.com. ↩

yesterday 4 votes
The Angels and Demons of Nondeterminism

Greetings everyone! You might have noticed that it's September and I don't have the next version of Logic for Programmers ready. As penance, here's ten free copies of the book. So a few months ago I wrote a newsletter about how we use nondeterminism in formal methods. The overarching idea: Nondeterminism is when multiple paths are possible from a starting state. A system preserves a property if it holds on all possible paths. If even one path violates the property, then we have a bug. An intuitive model of this is that for this is that when faced with a nondeterministic choice, the system always makes the worst possible choice. This is sometimes called demonic nondeterminism and is favored in formal methods because we are paranoid to a fault. The opposite would be angelic nondeterminism, where the system always makes the best possible choice. A property then holds if any possible path satisfies that property.1 This is not as common in FM, but it still has its uses! "Players can access the secret level" or "We can always shut down the computer" are reachability properties, that something is possible even if not actually done. In broader computer science research, I'd say that angelic nondeterminism is more popular, due to its widespread use in complexity analysis and programming languages. Complexity Analysis P is the set of all "decision problems" (basically, boolean functions) can be solved in polynomial time: there's an algorithm that's worst-case in O(n), O(n²), O(n³), etc.2 NP is the set of all problems that can be solved in polynomial time by an algorithm with angelic nondeterminism.3 For example, the question "does list l contain x" can be solved in O(1) time by a nondeterministic algorithm: fun is_member(l: List[T], x: T): bool { if l == [] {return false}; guess i in 0..<(len(l)-1); return l[i] == x; } Say call is_member([a, b, c, d], c). The best possible choice would be to guess i = 2, which would correctly return true. Now call is_member([a, b], d). No matter what we guess, the algorithm correctly returns false. and just return false. Ergo, O(1). NP stands for "Nondeterministic Polynomial". (And I just now realized something pretty cool: you can say that P is the set of all problems solvable in polynomial time under demonic nondeterminism, which is a nice parallel between the two classes.) Computer scientists have proven that angelic nondeterminism doesn't give us any more "power": there are no problems solvable with AN that aren't also solvable deterministically. The big question is whether AN is more efficient: it is widely believed, but not proven, that there are problems in NP but not in P. Most famously, "Is there any variable assignment that makes this boolean formula true?" A polynomial AN algorithm is again easy: fun SAT(f(x1, x2, …: bool): bool): bool { N = num_params(f) for i in 1..=num_params(f) { guess x_i in {true, false} } return f(x_1, x_2, …) } The best deterministic algorithms we have to solve the same problem are worst-case exponential with the number of boolean parameters. This a real frustrating problem because real computers don't have angelic nondeterminism, so problems like SAT remain hard. We can solve most "well-behaved" instances of the problem in reasonable time, but the worst-case instances get intractable real fast. Means of Abstraction We can directly turn an AN algorithm into a (possibly much slower) deterministic algorithm, such as by backtracking. This makes AN a pretty good abstraction over what an algorithm is doing. Does the regex (a+b)\1+ match "abaabaabaab"? Yes, if the regex engine nondeterministically guesses that it needs to start at the third letter and make the group aab. How does my PL's regex implementation find that match? I dunno, backtracking or NFA construction or something, I don't need to know the deterministic specifics in order to use the nondeterministic abstraction. Neel Krishnaswami has a great definition of 'declarative language': "any language with a semantics has some nontrivial existential quantifiers in it". I'm not sure if this is identical to saying "a language with an angelic nondeterministic abstraction", but they must be pretty close, and all of his examples match: SQL's selects and joins Parsing DSLs Logic programming's unification Constraint solving On top of that I'd add CSS selectors and planner's actions; all nondeterministic abstractions over a deterministic implementation. He also says that the things programmers hate most in declarative languages are features that "that expose the operational model": constraint solver search strategies, Prolog cuts, regex backreferences, etc. Which again matches my experiences with angelic nondeterminism: I dread features that force me to understand the deterministic implementation. But they're necessary, since P probably != NP and so we need to worry about operational optimizations. Eldritch Nondeterminism If you need to know the ratio of good/bad paths, the number of good paths, or probability, or anything more than "there is a good path" or "there is a bad path", you are beyond the reach of heaven or hell. Angelic and demonic nondeterminism are duals: angelic returns "yes" if some choice: correct and demonic returns "no" if !all choice: correct, which is the same as some choice: !correct. ↩ Pet peeve about Big-O notation: O(n²) is the set of all algorithms that, for sufficiently large problem sizes, grow no faster that quadratically. "Bubblesort has O(n²) complexity" should be written Bubblesort in O(n²), not Bubblesort = O(n²). ↩ To be precise, solvable in polynomial time by a Nondeterministic Turing Machine, a very particular model of computation. We can broadly talk about P and NP without framing everything in terms of Turing machines, but some details of complexity classes (like the existence "weak NP-hardness") kinda need Turing machines to make sense. ↩

a week ago 14 votes
Logical Duals in Software Engineering

(Last week's newsletter took too long and I'm way behind on Logic for Programmers revisions so short one this time.1) In classical logic, two operators F/G are duals if F(x) = !G(!x). Three examples: x || y is the same as !(!x && !y). <>P ("P is possibly true") is the same as ![]!P ("not P isn't definitely true"). some x in set: P(x) is the same as !(all x in set: !P(x)). (1) is just a version of De Morgan's Law, which we regularly use to simplify boolean expressions. (2) is important in modal logic but has niche applications in software engineering, mostly in how it powers various formal methods.2 The real interesting one is (3), the "quantifier duals". We use lots of software tools to either find a value satisfying P or check that all values satisfy P. And by duality, any tool that does one can do the other, by seeing if it fails to find/check !P. Some examples in the wild: Z3 is used to solve mathematical constraints, like "find x, where f(x) >= 0. If I want to prove a property like "f is always positive", I ask z3 to solve "find x, where !(f(x) >= 0), and see if that is unsatisfiable. This use case powers a LOT of theorem provers and formal verification tooling. Property testing checks that all inputs to a code block satisfy a property. I've used it to generate complex inputs with certain properties by checking that all inputs don't satisfy the property and reading out the test failure. Model checkers check that all behaviors of a specification satisfy a property, so we can find a behavior that reaches a goal state G by checking that all states are !G. Here's TLA+ solving a puzzle this way.3 Planners find behaviors that reach a goal state, so we can check if all behaviors satisfy a property P by asking it to reach goal state !P. The problem "find the shortest traveling salesman route" can be broken into some route: distance(route) = n and all route: !(distance(route) < n). Then a route finder can find the first, and then convert the second into a some and fail to find it, proving n is optimal. Even cooler to me is when a tool does both finding and checking, but gives them different "meanings". In SQL, some x: P(x) is true if we can query for P(x) and get a nonempty response, while all x: P(x) is true if all records satisfy the P(x) constraint. Most SQL databases allow for complex queries but not complex constraints! You got UNIQUE, NOT NULL, REFERENCES, which are fixed predicates, and CHECK, which is one-record only.4 Oh, and you got database triggers, which can run arbitrary queries and throw exceptions. So if you really need to enforce a complex constraint P(x, y, z), you put in a database trigger that queries some x, y, z: !P(x, y, z) and throws an exception if it finds any results. That all works because of quantifier duality! See here for an example of this in practice. Duals more broadly "Dual" doesn't have a strict meaning in math, it's more of a vibe thing where all of the "duals" are kinda similar in meaning but don't strictly follow all of the same rules. Usually things X and Y are duals if there is some transform F where X = F(Y) and Y = F(X), but not always. Maybe the category theorists have a formal definition that covers all of the different uses. Usually duals switch properties of things, too: an example showing some x: P(x) becomes a counterexample of all x: !P(x). Under this definition, I think the dual of a list l could be reverse(l). The first element of l becomes the last element of reverse(l), the last becomes the first, etc. A more interesting case is the dual of a K -> set(V) map is the V -> set(K) map. IE the dual of lived_in_city = {alice: {paris}, bob: {detroit}, charlie: {detroit, paris}} is city_lived_in_by = {paris: {alice, charlie}, detroit: {bob, charlie}}. This preserves the property that x in map[y] <=> y in dual[x]. And after writing this I just realized this is partial retread of a newsletter I wrote a couple months ago. But only a partial retread! ↩ Specifically "linear temporal logics" are modal logics, so "eventually P ("P is true in at least one state of each behavior") is the same as saying !always !P ("not P isn't true in all states of all behaviors"). This is the basis of liveness checking. ↩ I don't know for sure, but my best guess is that Antithesis does something similar when their fuzzer beats videogames. They're doing fuzzing, not model checking, but they have the same purpose check that complex state spaces don't have bugs. Making the bug "we can't reach the end screen" can make a fuzzer output a complete end-to-end run of the game. Obvs a lot more complicated than that but that's the general idea at least. ↩ For CHECK to constraint multiple records you would need to use a subquery. Core SQL does not support subqueries in check. It is an optional database "feature outside of core SQL" (F671), which Postgres does not support. ↩

2 weeks ago 19 votes
Sapir-Whorf does not apply to Programming Languages

This one is a hot mess but it's too late in the week to start over. Oh well! Someone recognized me at last week's Chipy and asked for my opinion on Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in programming languages. I thought this was interesting enough to make a newsletter. First what it is, then why it looks like it applies, and then why it doesn't apply after all. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. — Whorf To quote from a Linguistics book I've read, the hypothesis is that "an individual's fundamental perception of reality is moulded by the language they speak." As a massive oversimplification, if English did not have a word for "rebellion", we would not be able to conceive of rebellion. This view, now called Linguistic Determinism, is mostly rejected by modern linguists. The "weak" form of SWH is that the language we speak influences, but does not decide our cognition. For example, Russian has distinct words for "light blue" and "dark blue", so can discriminate between "light blue" and "dark blue" shades faster than they can discriminate two "light blue" shades. English does not have distinct words, so we discriminate those at the same speed. This linguistic relativism seems to have lots of empirical support in studies, but mostly with "small indicators". I don't think there's anything that convincingly shows linguistic relativism having effects on a societal level.1 The weak form of SWH for software would then be the "the programming languages you know affects how you think about programs." SWH in software This seems like a natural fit, as different paradigms solve problems in different ways. Consider the hardest interview question ever, "given a list of integers, sum the even numbers". Here it is in four paradigms: Procedural: total = 0; foreach x in list {if IsEven(x) total += x}. You iterate over data with an algorithm. Functional: reduce(+, filter(IsEven, list), 0). You apply transformations to data to get a result. Array: + fold L * iseven L.2 In English: replace every element in L with 0 if odd and 1 if even, multiple the new array elementwise against L, and then sum the resulting array. It's like functional except everything is in terms of whole-array transformations. Logical: Somethingish like sumeven(0, []). sumeven(X, [Y|L]) :- iseven(Y) -> sumeven(Z, L), X is Y + Z ; sumeven(X, L). You write a set of equations that express what it means for X to be the sum of events of L. There's some similarities between how these paradigms approach the problem, but each is also unique, too. It's plausible that where a procedural programmer "sees" a for loop, a functional programmer "sees" a map and an array programmer "sees" a singular operator. I also have a personal experience with how a language changed the way I think. I use TLA+ to detect concurrency bugs in software designs. After doing this for several years, I've gotten much better at intuitively seeing race conditions in things even without writing a TLA+ spec. It's even leaked out into my day-to-day life. I see concurrency bugs everywhere. Phone tag is a race condition. But I still don't think SWH is the right mental model to use, for one big reason: language is special. We think in language, we dream in language, there are huge parts of our brain dedicated to processing language. We don't use those parts of our brain to read code. SWH is so intriguing because it seems so unnatural, that the way we express thoughts changes the way we think thoughts. That I would be a different person if I was bilingual in Spanish, not because the life experiences it would open up but because grammatical gender would change my brain. Compared to that, the idea that programming languages affect our brain is more natural and has a simpler explanation: It's the goddamned Tetris Effect. The Goddamned Tetris Effect The Tetris effect occurs when someone dedicates vast amounts of time, effort and concentration on an activity which thereby alters their thoughts, dreams, and other experiences not directly linked to said activity. — Wikipedia Every skill does this. I'm a juggler, so every item I can see right now has a tiny metadata field of "how would this tumble if I threw it up". I teach professionally, so I'm always noticing good teaching examples everywhere. I spent years writing specs in TLA+ and watching the model checker throw concurrency errors in my face, so now race conditions have visceral presence. Every skill does this. And to really develop a skill, you gotta practice. This is where I think programming paradigms do something especially interesting that make them feel more like Sapir-Whorfy than, like, juggling. Some languages mix lots of different paradigms, like Javascript or Rust. Others like Haskell really focus on excluding paradigms. If something is easy for you in procedural and hard in FP, in JS you could just lean on the procedural bits. In Haskell, too bad, you're learning how to do it the functional way.3 And that forces you to practice, which makes you see functional patterns everywhere. Tetris effect! Anyway this may all seem like quibbling— why does it matter whether we call it "Tetris effect" or "Sapir-Whorf", if our brains is get rewired either way? For me, personally, it's because SWH sounds really special and unique, while Tetris effect sounds mundane and commonplace. Which it is. But also because TE suggests it's not just programming languages that affect how we think about software, it's everything. Spending lots of time debugging, profiling, writing exploits, whatever will change what you notice, what you think a program "is". And that's a way useful idea that shouldn't be restricted to just PLs. (Then again, the Tetris Effect might also be a bad analogy to what's going on here, because I think part of it is that it wears off after a while. Maybe it's just "building a mental model is good".) I just realized all of this might have missed the point Wait are people actually using SWH to mean the weak form or the strong form? Like that if a language doesn't make something possible, its users can't conceive of it being possible. I've been arguing against the weaker form in software but I think I've seen strong form often too. Dammit. Well, it's already Thursday and far too late to rewrite the whole newsletter, so I'll just outline the problem with the strong form: we describe the capabilities of our programming languages with human language. In college I wrote a lot of crappy physics lab C++ and one of my projects was filled with comments like "man I hate copying this triply-nested loop in 10 places with one-line changes, I wish I could put it in one function and just take the changing line as a parameter". Even if I hadn't encountered higher-order functions, I was still perfectly capable of expressing the idea. So if the strong SWH isn't true for human language, it's not true for programming languages either. Systems Distributed talk now up! Link here! Original abstract: Building correct distributed systems takes thinking outside the box, and the fastest way to do that is to think inside a different box. One different box is "formal methods", the discipline of mathematically verifying software and systems. Formal methods encourages unusual perspectives on systems, models that are also broadly useful to all software developers. In this talk we will learn two of the most important FM perspectives: the abstract specifications behind software systems, and the property they are and aren't supposed to have. The talk ended up evolving away from that abstract but I like how it turned out! There is one paper arguing that people who speak a language that doesn't have a "future tense" are more likely to save and eat healthy, but it is... extremely questionable. ↩ The original J is +/ (* (0 = 2&|)). Obligatory Notation as a Tool of Thought reference ↩ Though if it's too hard for you, that's why languages have escape hatches ↩

3 weeks ago 19 votes
Software books I wish I could read

New Logic for Programmers Release! v0.11 is now available! This is over 20% longer than v0.10, with a new chapter on code proofs, three chapter overhauls, and more! Full release notes here. Software books I wish I could read I'm writing Logic for Programmers because it's a book I wanted to have ten years ago. I had to learn everything in it the hard way, which is why I'm ensuring that everybody else can learn it the easy way. Books occupy a sort of weird niche in software. We're great at sharing information via blogs and git repos and entire websites. These have many benefits over books: they're free, they're easily accessible, they can be updated quickly, they can even be interactive. But no blog post has influenced me as profoundly as Data and Reality or Making Software. There is no blog or talk about debugging as good as the Debugging book. It might not be anything deeper than "people spend more time per word on writing books than blog posts". I dunno. So here are some other books I wish I could read. I don't think any of them exist yet but it's a big world out there. Also while they're probably best as books, a website or a series of blog posts would be ok too. Everything about Configurations The whole topic of how we configure software, whether by CLI flags, environmental vars, or JSON/YAML/XML/Dhall files. What causes the configuration complexity clock? How do we distinguish between basic, advanced, and developer-only configuration options? When should we disallow configuration? How do we test all possible configurations for correctness? Why do so many widespread outages trace back to misconfiguration, and how do we prevent them? I also want the same for plugin systems. Manifests, permissions, common APIs and architectures, etc. Configuration management is more universal, though, since everybody either uses software with configuration or has made software with configuration. The Big Book of Complicated Data Schemas I guess this would kind of be like Schema.org, except with a lot more on the "why" and not the what. Why is important for the Volcano model to have a "smokingAllowed" field?1 I'd see this less as "here's your guide to putting Volcanos in your database" and more "here's recurring motifs in modeling interesting domains", to help a person see sources of complexity in their own domain. Does something crop up if the references can form a cycle? If a relationship needs to be strictly temporary, or a reference can change type? Bonus: path dependence in data models, where an additional requirement leads to a vastly different ideal data model that a company couldn't do because they made the old model. (This has got to exist, right? Business modeling is a big enough domain that this must exist. Maybe The Essence of Software touches on this? Man I feel bad I haven't read that yet.) Computer Science for Software Engineers Yes, I checked, this book does not exist (though maybe this is the same thing). I don't have any formal software education; everything I know was either self-taught or learned on the job. But it's way easier to learn software engineering that way than computer science. And I bet there's a lot of other engineers in the same boat. This book wouldn't have to be comprehensive or instructive: just enough about each topic to understand why it's an area of study and appreciate how research in it eventually finds its way into practice. MISU Patterns MISU, or "Make Illegal States Unrepresentable", is the idea of designing system invariants in the structure of your data. For example, if a Contact needs at least one of email or phone to be non-null, make it a sum type over EmailContact, PhoneContact, EmailPhoneContact (from this post). MISU is great. Most MISU in the wild look very different than that, though, because the concept of MISU is so broad there's lots of different ways to achieve it. And that means there are "patterns": smart constructors, product types, properly using sets, newtypes to some degree, etc. Some of them are specific to typed FP, while others can be used in even untyped languages. Someone oughta make a pattern book. My one request would be to not give them cutesy names. Do something like the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index, where items are given names like "Recognition by manner of throwing cakes of different weights into faces of old uncles". Names can come later. The Tools of '25 Not something I'd read, but something to recommend to junior engineers. Starting out it's easy to think the only bit that matters is the language or framework and not realize the enormous amount of surrounding tooling you'll have to learn. This book would cover the basics of tools that enough developers will probably use at some point: git, VSCode, very basic Unix and bash, curl. Maybe the general concepts of tools that appear in every ecosystem, like package managers, build tools, task runners. That might be easier if we specialize this to one particular domain, like webdev or data science. Ideally the book would only have to be updated every five years or so. No LLM stuff because I don't expect the tooling will be stable through 2026, to say nothing of 2030. A History of Obsolete Optimizations Probably better as a really long blog series. Each chapter would be broken up into two parts: A deep dive into a brilliant, elegant, insightful historical optimization designed to work within the constraints of that era's computing technology What we started doing instead, once we had more compute/network/storage available. c.f. A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering. Bonus topics would be brilliance obsoleted by standardization (like what people did before git and json were universal), optimizations we do today that may not stand the test of time, and optimizations from the past that did. Sphinx Internals I need this. I've spent so much goddamn time digging around in Sphinx and docutils source code I'm gonna throw up. Systems Distributed Talk Today! Online premier's at noon central / 5 PM UTC, here! I'll be hanging out to answer questions and be awkward. You ever watch a recording of your own talk? It's real uncomfortable! In this case because it's a field on one of Volcano's supertypes. I guess schemas gotta follow LSP too ↩

a month ago 31 votes

More in programming

first-class merges and cover letters

Although it looks really good, I have not yet tried the Jujutsu (jj) version control system, mainly because it’s not yet clearly superior to Magit. But I have been following jj discussions with great interest. One of the things that jj has not yet tackled is how to do better than git refs / branches / tags. As I underestand it, jj currently has something like Mercurial bookmarks, which are more like raw git ref plumbing than a high-level porcelain feature. In particular, jj lacks signed or annotated tags, and it doesn’t have branch names that always automatically refer to the tip. This is clearly a temporary state of affairs because jj is still incomplete and under development and these gaps are going to be filled. But the discussions have led me to think about how git’s branches are unsatisfactory, and what could be done to improve them. branch merge rebase squash fork cover letters previous branch workflow questions branch One of the huge improvements in git compared to Subversion was git’s support for merges. Subversion proudly advertised its support for lightweight branches, but a branch is not very useful if you can’t merge it: an un-mergeable branch is not a tool you can use to help with work-in-progress development. The point of this anecdote is to illustrate that rather than trying to make branches better, we should try to make merges better and branches will get better as a consequence. Let’s consider a few common workflows and how git makes them all unsatisfactory in various ways. Skip to cover letters and previous branch below where I eventually get to the point. merge A basic merge workflow is, create a feature branch hack, hack, review, hack, approve merge back to the trunk The main problem is when it comes to the merge, there may be conflicts due to concurrent work on the trunk. Git encourages you to resolve conflicts while creating the merge commit, which tends to bypass the normal review process. Git also gives you an ugly useless canned commit message for merges, that hides what you did to resolve the conflicts. If the feature branch is a linear record of the work then it can be cluttered with commits to address comments from reviewers and to fix mistakes. Some people like an accurate record of the history, but others prefer the repository to contain clean logical changes that will make sense in years to come, keeping the clutter in the code review system. rebase A rebase-oriented workflow deals with the problems of the merge workflow but introduces new problems. Primarily, rebasing is intended to produce a tidy logical commit history. And when a feature branch is rebased onto the trunk before it is merged, a simple fast-forward check makes it trivial to verify that the merge will be clean (whether it uses separate merge commit or directly fast-forwards the trunk). However, it’s hard to compare the state of the feature branch before and after the rebase. The current and previous tips of the branch (amongst other clutter) are recorded in the reflog of the person who did the rebase, but they can’t share their reflog. A force-push erases the previous branch from the server. Git forges sometimes make it possible to compare a branch before and after a rebase, but it’s usually very inconvenient, which makes it hard to see if review comments have been addressed. And a reviewer can’t fetch past versions of the branch from the server to review them locally. You can mitigate these problems by adding commits in --autosquash format, and delay rebasing until just before merge. However that reintroduces the problem of merge conflicts: if the autosquash doesn’t apply cleanly the branch should have another round of review to make sure the conflicts were resolved OK. squash When the trunk consists of a sequence of merge commits, the --first-parent log is very uninformative. A common way to make the history of the trunk more informative, and deal with the problems of cluttered feature branches and poor rebase support, is to squash the feature branch into a single commit on the trunk instead of mergeing. This encourages merge requests to be roughly the size of one commit, which is arguably a good thing. However, it can be uncomfortably confining for larger features, or cause extra busy-work co-ordinating changes across multiple merge requests. And squashed feature branches have the same merge conflict problem as rebase --autosquash. fork Feature branches can’t always be short-lived. In the past I have maintained local hacks that were used in production but were not (not yet?) suitable to submit upstream. I have tried keeping a stack of these local patches on a git branch that gets rebased onto each upstream release. With this setup the problem of reviewing successive versions of a merge request becomes the bigger problem of keeping track of how the stack of patches evolved over longer periods of time. cover letters Cover letters are common in the email patch workflow that predates git, and they are supported by git format-patch. Github and other forges have a webby version of the cover letter: the message that starts off a pull request or merge request. In git, cover letters are second-class citizens: they aren’t stored in the repository. But many of the problems I outlined above have neat solutions if cover letters become first-class citizens, with a Jujutsu twist. A first-class cover letter starts off as a prototype for a merge request, and becomes the eventual merge commit. Instead of unhelpful auto-generated merge commits, you get helpful and informative messages. No extra work is needed since we’re already writing cover letters. Good merge commit messages make good --first-parent logs. The cover letter subject line works as a branch name. No more need to invent filename-compatible branch names! Jujutsu doesn’t make you name branches, giving them random names instead. It shows the subject line of the topmost commit as a reminder of what the branch is for. If there’s an explicit cover letter the subject line will be a better summary of the branch as a whole. I often find the last commit on a branch is some post-feature cleanup, and that kind of commit has a subject line that is never a good summary of its feature branch. As a prototype for the merge commit, the cover letter can contain the resolution of all the merge conflicts in a way that can be shared and reviewed. In Jujutsu, where conflicts are first class, the cover letter commit can contain unresolved conflicts: you don’t have to clean them up when creating the merge, you can leave that job until later. If you can share a prototype of your merge commit, then it becomes possible for your collaborators to review any merge conflicts and how you resolved them. To distinguish a cover letter from a merge commit object, a cover letter object has a “target” header which is a special kind of parent header. A cover letter also has a normal parent commit header that refers to earlier commits in the feature branch. The target is what will become the first parent of the eventual merge commit. previous branch The other ingredient is to add a “previous branch” header, another special kind of parent commit header. The previous branch header refers to an older version of the cover letter and, transitively, an older version of the whole feature branch. Typically the previous branch header will match the last shared version of the branch, i.e. the commit hash of the server’s copy of the feature branch. The previous branch header isn’t changed during normal work on the feature branch. As the branch is revised and rebased, the commit hash of the cover letter will change fairly frequently. These changes are recorded in git’s reflog or jj’s oplog, but not in the “previous branch” chain. You can use the previous branch chain to examine diffs between versions of the feature branch as a whole. If commits have Gerrit-style or jj-style change-IDs then it’s fairly easy to find and compare previous versions of an individual commit. The previous branch header supports interdiff code review, or allows you to retain past iterations of a patch series. workflow Here are some sketchy notes on how these features might work in practice. One way to use cover letters is jj-style, where it’s convenient to edit commits that aren’t at the tip of a branch, and easy to reshuffle commits so that a branch has a deliberate narrative. When you create a new feature branch, it starts off as an empty cover letter with both target and parent pointing at the same commit. Alternatively, you might start a branch ad hoc, and later cap it with a cover letter. If this is a small change and rebase + fast-forward is allowed, you can edit the “cover letter” to contain the whole change. Otherwise, you can hack on the branch any which way. Shuffle the commits that should be part of the merge request so that they occur before the cover letter, and edit the cover letter to summarize the preceding commits. When you first push the branch, there’s (still) no need to give it a name: the server can see that this is (probably) going to be a new merge request because the top commit has a target branch and its change-ID doesn’t match an existing merge request. Also when you push, your client automatically creates a new instance of your cover letter, adding a “previous branch” header to indicate that the old version was shared. The commits on the branch that were pushed are now immutable; rebases and edits affect the new version of the branch. During review there will typically be multiple iterations of the branch to address feedback. The chain of previous branch headers allows reviewers to see how commits were changed to address feedback, interdiff style. The branch can be merged when the target header matches the current trunk and there are no conflicts left to resolve. When the time comes to merge the branch, there are several options: For a merge workflow, the cover letter is used to make a new commit on the trunk, changing the target header into the first parent commit, and dropping the previous branch header. Or, if you like to preserve more history, the previous branch chain can be retained. Or you can drop the cover letter and fast foward the branch on to the trunk. Or you can squash the branch on to the trunk, using the cover letter as the commit message. questions This is a fairly rough idea: I’m sure that some of the details won’t work in practice without a lot of careful work on compatibility and deployability. Do the new commit headers (“target” and “previous branch”) need to be headers? What are the compatibility issues with adding new headers that refer to other commits? How would a server handle a push of an unnamed branch? How could someone else pull a copy of it? How feasible is it to use cover letter subject lines instead of branch names? The previous branch header is doing a similar job to a remote tracking branch. Is there an opportunity to simplify how we keep a local cache of the server state? Despite all that, I think something along these lines could make branches / reviews / reworks / merges less awkward. How you merge should me a matter of your project’s preferred style, without interference from technical limitations that force you to trade off one annoyance against another. There remains a non-technical limitation: I have assumed that contributors are comfortable enough with version control to use a history-editing workflow effectively. I’ve lost all perspective on how hard this is for a newbie to learn; I expect (or hope?) jj makes it much easier than git rebase.

17 hours ago 5 votes
Performant Full-Disk Encryption on a Raspberry Pi, but Foiled by Twisty UARTs

In my post yesterday (“ARM is great, ARM is terrible (and so is RISC-V)), I described my desire to find ARM hardware with AES instructions to support full-disk encryption, and the poor state of the OS ecosystem around the newer ARM boards. I was anticipating buying either a newer ARM SBC or an x86 mini … Continue reading Performant Full-Disk Encryption on a Raspberry Pi, but Foiled by Twisty UARTs →

5 hours ago 2 votes
Words are not violence

Debates, at their finest, are about exploring topics together in search for truth. That probably sounds hopelessly idealistic to anyone who've ever perused a comment section on the internet, but ideals are there to remind us of what's possible, to inspire us to reach higher — even if reality falls short. I've been reaching for those debating ideals for thirty years on the internet. I've argued with tens of thousands of people, first on Usenet, then in blog comments, then Twitter, now X, and also LinkedIn — as well as a million other places that have come and gone. It's mostly been about technology, but occasionally about society and morality too. There have been plenty of heated moments during those three decades. It doesn't take much for a debate between strangers on this internet to escalate into something far lower than a "search for truth", and I've often felt willing to settle for just a cordial tone! But for the majority of that time, I never felt like things might escalate beyond the keyboards and into the real world. That was until we had our big blow-up at 37signals back in 2021. I suddenly got to see a different darkness from the most vile corners of the internet. Heard from those who seem to prowl for a mob-sanctioned opportunity to threaten and intimidate those they disagree with. It fundamentally changed me. But I used the experience as a mirror to reflect on the ways my own engagement with the arguments occasionally felt too sharp, too personal. And I've since tried to refocus way more of my efforts on the positive and the productive. I'm by no means perfect, and the internet often tempts the worst in us, but I resist better now than I did then. What I cannot come to terms with, though, is the modern equation of words with violence. The growing sense of permission that if the disagreement runs deep enough, then violence is a justified answer to settle it. That sounds so obvious that we shouldn't need to state it in a civil society, but clearly it is not. Not even in technology. Not even in programming. There are plenty of factions here who've taken to justify their violent fantasies by referring to their ideological opponents as "nazis", "fascists", or "racists". And then follow that up with a call to "punch a nazi" or worse. When you hear something like that often enough, it's easy to grow glib about it. That it's just a saying. They don't mean it. But I'm afraid many of them really do. Which brings us to Charlie Kirk. And the technologists who name drinks at their bar after his mortal wound just hours after his death, to name but one of the many, morbid celebrations of the famous conservative debater's death. It's sickening. Deeply, profoundly sickening. And my first instinct was exactly what such people would delight in happening. To watch the rest of us recoil, then retract, and perhaps even eject. To leave the internet for a while or forever. But I can't do that. We shouldn't do that. Instead, we should double down on the opposite. Continue to show up with our ideals held high while we debate strangers in that noble search for the truth. Where we share our excitement, our enthusiasm, and our love of technology, country, and humanity. I think that's what Charlie Kirk did so well. Continued to show up for the debate. Even on hostile territory. Not because he thought he was ever going to convince everyone, but because he knew he'd always reach some with a good argument, a good insight, or at least a different perspective. You could agree or not. Counter or be quiet. But the earnest exploration of the topics in a live exchange with another human is as fundamental to our civilization as Socrates himself. Don't give up, don't give in. Keep debating.

3 hours ago 2 votes
ARM is great, ARM is terrible (and so is RISC-V)

I’ve long been interested in new and different platforms. I ran Debian on an Alpha back in the late 1990s and was part of the Alpha port team; then I helped bootstrap Debian on amd64. I’ve got somewhere around 8 Raspberry Pi devices in active use right now, and the free NNCPNET Internet email service … Continue reading ARM is great, ARM is terrible (and so is RISC-V) →

yesterday 4 votes
Many Hard Leetcode Problems are Easy Constraint Problems

In my first interview out of college I was asked the change counter problem: Given a set of coin denominations, find the minimum number of coins required to make change for a given number. IE for USA coinage and 37 cents, the minimum number is four (quarter, dime, 2 pennies). I implemented the simple greedy algorithm and immediately fell into the trap of the question: the greedy algorithm only works for "well-behaved" denominations. If the coin values were [10, 9, 1], then making 37 cents would take 10 coins in the greedy algorithm but only 4 coins optimally (10+9+9+9). The "smart" answer is to use a dynamic programming algorithm, which I didn't know how to do. So I failed the interview. But you only need dynamic programming if you're writing your own algorithm. It's really easy if you throw it into a constraint solver like MiniZinc and call it a day. int: total; array[int] of int: values = [10, 9, 1]; array[index_set(values)] of var 0..: coins; constraint sum (c in index_set(coins)) (coins[c] * values[c]) == total; solve minimize sum(coins); You can try this online here. It'll give you a prompt to put in total and then give you successively-better solutions: coins = [0, 0, 37]; ---------- coins = [0, 1, 28]; ---------- coins = [0, 2, 19]; ---------- coins = [0, 3, 10]; ---------- coins = [0, 4, 1]; ---------- coins = [1, 3, 0]; ---------- Lots of similar interview questions are this kind of mathematical optimization problem, where we have to find the maximum or minimum of a function corresponding to constraints. They're hard in programming languages because programming languages are too low-level. They are also exactly the problems that constraint solvers were designed to solve. Hard leetcode problems are easy constraint problems.1 Here I'm using MiniZinc, but you could just as easily use Z3 or OR-Tools or whatever your favorite generalized solver is. More examples This was a question in a different interview (which I thankfully passed): Given a list of stock prices through the day, find maximum profit you can get by buying one stock and selling one stock later. It's easy to do in O(n^2) time, or if you are clever, you can do it in O(n). Or you could be not clever at all and just write it as a constraint problem: array[int] of int: prices = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8]; var int: buy; var int: sell; var int: profit = prices[sell] - prices[buy]; constraint sell > buy; constraint profit > 0; solve maximize profit; Reminder, link to trying it online here. While working at that job, one interview question we tested out was: Given a list, determine if three numbers in that list can be added or subtracted to give 0? This is a satisfaction problem, not a constraint problem: we don't need the "best answer", any answer will do. We eventually decided against it for being too tricky for the engineers we were targeting. But it's not tricky in a solver; include "globals.mzn"; array[int] of int: numbers = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8]; array[index_set(numbers)] of var {0, -1, 1}: choices; constraint sum(n in index_set(numbers)) (numbers[n] * choices[n]) = 0; constraint count(choices, -1) + count(choices, 1) = 3; solve satisfy; Okay, one last one, a problem I saw last year at Chipy AlgoSIG. Basically they pick some leetcode problems and we all do them. I failed to solve this one: Given an array of integers heights representing the histogram's bar height where the width of each bar is 1, return the area of the largest rectangle in the histogram. The "proper" solution is a tricky thing involving tracking lots of bookkeeping states, which you can completely bypass by expressing it as constraints: array[int] of int: numbers = [2,1,5,6,2,3]; var 1..length(numbers): x; var 1..length(numbers): dx; var 1..: y; constraint x + dx <= length(numbers); constraint forall (i in x..(x+dx)) (y <= numbers[i]); var int: area = (dx+1)*y; solve maximize area; output ["(\(x)->\(x+dx))*\(y) = \(area)"] There's even a way to automatically visualize the solution (using vis_geost_2d), but I didn't feel like figuring it out in time for the newsletter. Is this better? Now if I actually brought these questions to an interview the interviewee could ruin my day by asking "what's the runtime complexity?" Constraint solvers runtimes are unpredictable and almost always than an ideal bespoke algorithm because they are more expressive, in what I refer to as the capability/tractability tradeoff. But even so, they'll do way better than a bad bespoke algorithm, and I'm not experienced enough in handwriting algorithms to consistently beat a solver. The real advantage of solvers, though, is how well they handle new constraints. Take the stock picking problem above. I can write an O(n²) algorithm in a few minutes and the O(n) algorithm if you give me some time to think. Now change the problem to Maximize the profit by buying and selling up to max_sales stocks, but you can only buy or sell one stock at a given time and you can only hold up to max_hold stocks at a time? That's a way harder problem to write even an inefficient algorithm for! While the constraint problem is only a tiny bit more complicated: include "globals.mzn"; int: max_sales = 3; int: max_hold = 2; array[int] of int: prices = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8]; array [1..max_sales] of var int: buy; array [1..max_sales] of var int: sell; array [index_set(prices)] of var 0..max_hold: stocks_held; var int: profit = sum(s in 1..max_sales) (prices[sell[s]] - prices[buy[s]]); constraint forall (s in 1..max_sales) (sell[s] > buy[s]); constraint profit > 0; constraint forall(i in index_set(prices)) (stocks_held[i] = (count(s in 1..max_sales) (buy[s] <= i) - count(s in 1..max_sales) (sell[s] <= i))); constraint alldifferent(buy ++ sell); solve maximize profit; output ["buy at \(buy)\n", "sell at \(sell)\n", "for \(profit)"]; Most constraint solving examples online are puzzles, like Sudoku or "SEND + MORE = MONEY". Solving leetcode problems would be a more interesting demonstration. And you get more interesting opportunities to teach optimizations, like symmetry breaking. Because my dad will email me if I don't explain this: "leetcode" is slang for "tricky algorithmic interview questions that have little-to-no relevance in the actual job you're interviewing for." It's from leetcode.com. ↩

yesterday 4 votes