Computer Science
5 posts
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The Power of Zero: What is NULL anyway?
Is 0 the same as nothing? A guide to NULL, pointers, and why the 'Million Dollar Mistake' is probably in your code right now.
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A Field Guide to the Numbers that Show Up Everywhere
Why is it always 256? Why do ports stop at 65535? A look at the 'magic' numbers that define our digital world.
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The Unix Epoch: Why time started in 1970
Why do computers think the world began on January 1st, 1970? A guide to Unix timestamps and the 'Year 2038' problem.
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ASCII vs UTF-8: Why Emojis Break Things
Why is my string length wrong? A guide to character encoding and how we went from 127 characters to over 140,000.
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Concurrency vs Parallelism: A Coffee Shop Guide
Are you doing many things at once, or just dealing with many things at once? The subtle but important difference between concurrency and parallelism.