flâneur

Jinglin Li

7 followers · 336 views

on the atlas — 35

highlights — 20

  • The problem with example-based tests is that they end up making far stronger claims than they are actually able to demonstrate. Property-based tests improve on that by expressing exactly the circumstances in which our tests should be expected to pass. Example-based tests use a concrete scenario to suggest a general claim about the system’s behavior, while property-based tests directly focus on that general claim. Property-based testing libraries, meanwhile, provide the tools to test claims.
    In praise of property-based testing – Increment: Testing
  • Shrink the input in case of failure: whenever it fails, the framework tries to reduce the input to a smaller input. For instance: if the condition of the failure is the existence of a given character in a string it should return the one-character string having only this character. This is certainly one of the most interesting features of such approach as most of the time the failure can be summarized by a very small case.
    Introduction to Property Based Testing | by Nicolas Dubien | Criteo Tech Blog | Medium
  • git does not automatically download or update submodules
    Demystifying git submodules
  • A corollary to the preceding point is that complex systems run as broken systems.
    How Complex Systems Fail
  • how to distinguish between science and non-science
    Demarcation problem
  • The underperformance of both Grok 4 and Gemini 2.5 Pro is also notable, especially given state-of-the-art claims on many benchmarks when released. Beware of Goodhart's law! ↩
    Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
  • you can only learn the right kind of stubborn from experience.
    Being Productive
  • Don't overdo it though, swapping state between ideas is expensive. To minimize the state you need to keep in your head lean heavily on your infrastructure. Use types to catch mistakes at compile time and make invalid states impossible to encode; liberally sprinkle assertions and comments through your code; strategically log the internal state of your program to make it easy to recover its execution trace; keep notes about your ideas and experiment results.
    Being Productive
  • When working with others, you should a) liberally use code reviews, b) review incoming requests as quickly as possible (<<1h). Reviews are great to share knowledge, but nothing is worse than blocking progress with a slow review.
    Being Productive
  • topics that change slowly,
    Being Productive
  • For more up to date information, I'm subscribed to the RSS feeds of several dozen high signal-to-noise blogs (<< 1 post/day each), as well as a daily newsletter with the top 30 posts from Hacker News.
    Being Productive
  • Unlike traditional partitioning and Z-ordering, you can change your liquid clustering columns without having to rewrite all the data
    Delta Lake Liquid Clustering | Delta Lake
  • The problem with partitioning and Z-ordering is that they are not flexible. You have to decide on your partitioning columns ahead of time and if your query patterns change (one day your colleague needs to run a query on the customer column), you will have to rewrite the entire dataset to optimize it for that new query.
    Delta Lake Liquid Clustering | Delta Lake
  • Change Data Feed (CDF) is a native mechanism in Delta Lake that captures fine-grained changes—inserts, updates, and deletes—at the row level directly within your data tables. Unlike traditional methods that focus on the current state of the data, CDF preserves the full history of changes, recording what changed, how it changed, and when the change happened.
    Databricks Change Data Feed (CDF) Explained - dateonic.
  • Language as Economic Decision
    Why engineers can't be rational about programming languages | spf13
  • people cling to beliefs even when confronted with overwhelming contradictory evidence
    Why engineers can't be rational about programming languages | spf13
  • tgres maintains data consistency by using a multiversion model
    PostgreSQL: Documentation: 7.1: Multi-Version Concurrency Control
  • get_pr_comments() { if [ -n "$1" ]; then pr_number="$1" else read -p "Enter pull request number: " pr_number fi gh api repos/:owner/:repo/pulls/$pr_number/comments | jq '[ .[] | select(.user.type == "User" and .user.login == "$GH_USER") | { diff_hunk, line, start_line, body } ]' }
    `gh pr view --comments` should show all comments · Issue #5788 · cli/cli
  • example prompts to help you get a sense of prompting with Exa
    Hacker News Clone - Exa
  • e is he’s created this
    Curius / Onboarding