Today we are looking at how you can work with big integers in Python. What do I mean by “big” integers? A standard 32-bit integer tops out at 2,147,483,647. A standard 64-bit integer tops out at about 9.2 × 10^18. The very interesting thing about Python is: it doesn’t have a fixed ceiling for integers! The only limitation is the machine’s memory. So you can effectively store any integer in a Python int. ...
Threads are the smallest unit of execution that an operating system can schedule inside a process. People (me) get confused about what threads are and what processes are. This article will talk about threading as a programming concept and not the theory behind processes and threads. Nevertheless, we’ll talk about processes and threads too. Processes and threads Process A ├── Thread 1 ├── Thread 2 └── Thread 3 Process B ├── Thread 1 └── Thread 2 Process is an independent program instance. It has its own memory and resources. Think of it like an agent. A process can have one or more threads in it. Threads share the process memory and resources, though each thread has its own execution state and stack. How processes and threads are implemented depends on specific programming languages and operating systems, so I highly recommend checking out the wiki. ...
In this article I’d like to introduce you to a rather useful python library that can be of use to you. It’s called argparse and recently I have been using it as my go to for couple of things. I first got to know about this library when participating in a kaggle comp. It was pretty intimidating at first because you’re not sure what’s going on but after this article I am hoping you’d know how to deal with code that mentions argparse. We’ll also talk about config files and how this library can be used to write config file. ...
Today we look at matrix multiplication (matmul, as we will call in this essay). Since, the last essay was on backprop, it was only logical to think about the most fundamental math operation that lets us do the algo. That is, matmul. Also, the numbers in this essay are going to shock you. Like really. So if you think I am making this up, you should checkout my code for this essay. ...
what is this about? Today we’re looking at hashing. We’ll get into the process, the data structures and some applications. Through this article, we’ll see how we can implement dictionary operations, which are mainly: insert delete search what is Hashing? Hashing is a technique of identifying an object out of a group of similar objects. Analogy for hashing: Imagine if you took your name tiwariji and ran it through a complex mathematical function that produced 7a3f9c2e. You couldn’t look at 7a3f9c2e and figure out it came from tiwariji, but every time you hash tiwariji you’d get the same result. That, is hashing. Ideally, no two different inputs should produce the same hash output. We’ll talk about that later when we discuss hash functions. ...
Data management during compiler process When compiling a piece of code, the data in the code is stored in segments. There are five types of segments: stack heap data code BSS We will focus on stack and heap in this essay. Stack Stack allocation is the process of allocating memory for local variables and function calls in call stack. Each function gets some memory in the stack to store variables in it. Since the memory is handled by the system, its faster. But the memory is less as compared to heaps. The size required is already known before execution. The compiler allocates some memory. ...
Overview When you call int x = 0; in your code, where and how is that x stored? This is the question that I wanted to know the answer of. And in this essay, we’ll look at just that. And Why should you care? As we will understand later in the article, there are issues and subtle bugs that come when programmers don’t understand their code. Hackers want to figure out ways to exploit those bugs and gain entery into people’s systems. So knowing how, why, and where of your data, in your system is not only useful, I’d say it’s necessary. ...
do you know how your code int f(){ return 42; } turns into mov eax, 42 ret and then into B8 2A 00 00 00 C3 this? Here’s the whole essay in short: source code → something happens, Intermediate code forms → something happens again, Machine code is formed. We’ll clear the ‘something’ in this article. Life would be very simple if we humans could write 1s and 0s and directly give machine it’s prefered machine code. But since we don’t have 1000 hands per person and the outputs that we’re expecting out of computers have evolved to complexities unimaginable, we need another simpler way to talk to the machines. And that is why we have different programming languages and their compilation processes. ...