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Consumer applications
maps-routing
maps and route planning
Google Maps, OSRM
System
Techniques · 20
Primitives · 69
maps-routing
CDN and edge
cloud · medium: CDNs cache content in hundreds of PoPs near users, cutting latency and egress bills; edge compute runs small code there. Bandwidth price spreads 10x between providers.
›
Deterministic simulation testing
distributed · medium: Run the whole system in one thread under a seeded scheduler with simulated network, disk and clock, so every failure replays from its seed.
›
Primary-backup replication
distributed · medium: One node orders all writes and ships them to standbys; the acknowledgement rule (none, one, all) sets what a crash loses, and an external arbiter decides who takes over.
›
Address geocoding
geometry · medium: Parse, normalize and fuzzy-match postal addresses to coordinates and back
Map matching hmm
geometry · medium: HMM/Viterbi map matching of GPS traces onto the road graph
Contraction hierarchies (shortcut-b…
graphs · medium: Rank the nodes, remove them one by one while adding shortcut edges that keep distances intact, then answer queries with two tiny searches that only climb the ranking.
›
Customizable route planning
graphs · medium: Multi-level overlay routing (CRP) with fast metric customization for live traffic
Geospatial cell index (geohash, S2,…
geometry · low: Map a lat/lon to a 64-bit cell id on a hierarchical grid, so "near" becomes an integer range scan in any ordinary sorted index.
›
R-tree
geometry · low: A balanced tree of nested bounding boxes that indexes rectangles and points, answering window and nearest-neighbour queries by pruning whole subtrees.
›
Dijkstra's algorithm
graphs · low: Single-source shortest paths with non-negative edge weights by settling vertices in order of distance with a priority queue.
›
Delta encoding
compression · low: Store differences between consecutive values instead of the values, turning sorted IDs, timestamps and counters into small numbers that pack into few bits.
›
Varint (LEB128)
compression · low: Variable-length integers in 7-bit groups with a continuation bit; small numbers take 1 byte, the wire format of Protobuf, WebAssembly and DWARF.
›
Sparse matrices (CSR)
numerics · low: Compressed sparse row stores only nonzeros as row pointers, column indices and values; SpMV streams them once, so it is memory-bandwidth bound.
›
Hdr histogram
data-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentiles
Line simplification
geometry · low: Douglas-Peucker and Visvalingam polyline simplification
Map projections
geometry · low: Web Mercator, UTM and equal-area projections, datums and coordinate transforms
Point in polygon
geometry · low: Ray-casting/winding tests and indexed polygon lookup for reverse geocoding
Vector tile encoding
geometry · low: Mapbox Vector Tile protobuf: zigzag-delta geometry commands, layers and feature attributes
A* search
graphs · low: Dijkstra ordered by cost-so-far plus an admissible estimate of the remaining cost; optimal paths while exploring far fewer nodes toward the goal.
›
mmap and the page cache
hardware-os · low: How read() and mmap reach file data through the kernel page cache, what readahead and madvise do, and why databases use their own buffer pool instead.
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Process supervision
hardware-os · low: A parent process starts services, reaps their exits and restarts them under a delay and burst-limit policy, then stops them with SIGTERM before SIGKILL.
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Mutual TLS
security · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.
›
Graceful draining
systems · low: On a termination signal, stop taking new work, finish in-flight work until a deadline, tell clients to reconnect elsewhere, then exit; clients resume from a token.
›
+ 13 more techniques
+ 53 more primitives
System
Techniques · 20
Primitives · 69
maps-routing
CDN and edge
cloud · medium: CDNs cache content in hundreds of PoPs near users, cutting latency and egress bills; edge compute runs small code there. Bandwidth price spreads 10x between providers.
›
Deterministic simulation testing
distributed · medium: Run the whole system in one thread under a seeded scheduler with simulated network, disk and clock, so every failure replays from its seed.
›
Primary-backup replication
distributed · medium: One node orders all writes and ships them to standbys; the acknowledgement rule (none, one, all) sets what a crash loses, and an external arbiter decides who takes over.
›
Address geocoding
geometry · medium: Parse, normalize and fuzzy-match postal addresses to coordinates and back
Map matching hmm
geometry · medium: HMM/Viterbi map matching of GPS traces onto the road graph
Contraction hierarchies (shortcut-b…
graphs · medium: Rank the nodes, remove them one by one while adding shortcut edges that keep distances intact, then answer queries with two tiny searches that only climb the ranking.
›
Customizable route planning
graphs · medium: Multi-level overlay routing (CRP) with fast metric customization for live traffic
Raptor transit routing
graphs · medium: Round-based public transit / schedule routing (RAPTOR) with Pareto sets
Coverage-guided fuzzing
security · medium: Mutate inputs, run an instrumented target, and keep any input that reaches a new code edge; feedback turns blind guessing into incremental search.
›
Inverted index
storage · medium: Map each term to a sorted, compressed list of the documents containing it; the core of full-text search and other fast set queries.
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Point-in-time recovery
storage · medium: Periodic base backups plus a continuously archived change log let you rebuild the state as of any instant, then branch from there.
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Delta debugging
compilers · medium: Ddmin minimization of failing inputs or change sets
Fault injection
distributed · medium: Inject latency, errors, kills and partitions via proxies, netem or hooks
Address parsing
geometry · medium: Split free-text addresses into components (house, street, city, postcode) with rules or a sequence model
Graph partitioning
graphs · medium: Split a graph into k balanced parts with few edges between them; multilevel coarsen-partition-refine (METIS, KaHIP) for quality, streaming heuristics (LDG, Fennel) for one-pass scale.
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TLS 1.3
security · medium: The standard encrypted, authenticated transport; one round trip, only forward-secret AEAD suites, and little left to misconfigure.
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ARIES recovery
storage · medium: Three-pass crash recovery (analysis, redo, undo) for steal/no-force buffer pools; repeats history, then rolls back losers with compensation log records.
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Named entity recognition
machine-learning · medium: Find the character spans of entities in text and give each a type, by labelling every token and decoding a valid label sequence.
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Syscall interception
security · medium: Intercept syscalls via ptrace, seccomp user notify or a user-space kernel
Buffer pool
storage · medium: The database's own page cache (frames, page table, pin counts, dirty bits, replacement) so it, not the OS, controls eviction, write order and I/O.
›
Geospatial cell index (geohash, S2,…
geometry · low: Map a lat/lon to a 64-bit cell id on a hierarchical grid, so "near" becomes an integer range scan in any ordinary sorted index.
›
R-tree
geometry · low: A balanced tree of nested bounding boxes that indexes rectangles and points, answering window and nearest-neighbour queries by pruning whole subtrees.
›
Dijkstra's algorithm
graphs · low: Single-source shortest paths with non-negative edge weights by settling vertices in order of distance with a priority queue.
›
Delta encoding
compression · low: Store differences between consecutive values instead of the values, turning sorted IDs, timestamps and counters into small numbers that pack into few bits.
›
Varint (LEB128)
compression · low: Variable-length integers in 7-bit groups with a continuation bit; small numbers take 1 byte, the wire format of Protobuf, WebAssembly and DWARF.
›
Sparse matrices (CSR)
numerics · low: Compressed sparse row stores only nonzeros as row pointers, column indices and values; SpMV streams them once, so it is memory-bandwidth bound.
›
Hdr histogram
data-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentiles
Line simplification
geometry · low: Douglas-Peucker and Visvalingam polyline simplification
Map projections
geometry · low: Web Mercator, UTM and equal-area projections, datums and coordinate transforms
Point in polygon
geometry · low: Ray-casting/winding tests and indexed polygon lookup for reverse geocoding
Vector tile encoding
geometry · low: Mapbox Vector Tile protobuf: zigzag-delta geometry commands, layers and feature attributes
A* search
graphs · low: Dijkstra ordered by cost-so-far plus an admissible estimate of the remaining cost; optimal paths while exploring far fewer nodes toward the goal.
›
mmap and the page cache
hardware-os · low: How read() and mmap reach file data through the kernel page cache, what readahead and madvise do, and why databases use their own buffer pool instead.
›
Process supervision
hardware-os · low: A parent process starts services, reaps their exits and restarts them under a delay and burst-limit policy, then stops them with SIGTERM before SIGKILL.
›
Mutual TLS
security · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.
›
Graceful draining
systems · low: On a termination signal, stop taking new work, finish in-flight work until a deadline, tell clients to reconnect elsewhere, then exit; clients resume from a token.
›
HTTP caching semantics
networking · low: The rules (RFC 9111) that decide whether a stored response is still fresh, and how a cheap conditional request revalidates it when it is not.
›
Cooperative scheduling
concurrency · low: Green threads/coroutines yielding at await points on a user-space scheduler
Record replay
distributed · low: Record every nondeterministic input (time, randomness, I/O, model and tool outputs, per-tick player input) and re-execute deterministically for debugging, replays and state rebuild
PRNGs (PCG, xoshiro)
numerics · low: Small, fast, statistically strong non-cryptographic generators: PCG32 and xoshiro256**, with seeding, parallel streams and unbiased ranges.
›
Leases
distributed · low: A lock that expires on its own: bounded-time ownership that survives crashes and partitions, given bounded clock drift and fencing tokens on writes.
›
Write-ahead log
storage · low: Append each change to a checksummed sequential log and fsync it before touching data pages; the basis of crash durability in nearly every database.
›
Health checking
systems · low: Decide per backend whether to route to it using probes and real-traffic errors, with consecutive-count hysteresis, capped ejection and a panic fallback.
›
Address interpolation
geometry · low: Estimate a house-number position along a street segment from known address ranges
Fuzzy string matching
search-sort · low: Edit distance, Jaro-Winkler and trigram indexes for approximate name and address matching
Geodesic distance (haversine, Vince…
geometry · low: Shortest-path distance between two lat/lon points on the Earth: haversine on a sphere (about 0.5% error), Vincenty or Karney on the WGS84 ellipsoid (sub-millimetre).
›
Convolutional codes and the Viterbi…
signal-processing · low: Streaming error-correcting code: each output bit is a parity of the last K input bits; the Viterbi decoder finds the most likely path through a 2^(K-1)-state trellis.
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d-ary heap
data-structures · low: Array heap with d children per node (d = 4 typical): half the binary heap's depth, siblings in one cache line, faster priority queues.
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BFS and DFS
graphs · low: The two basic graph traversals; BFS gives hop distances and levels, DFS gives discovery/finish order for cycles, components and topological order.
›
Calendar date arithmetic
systems · low: Civil dates, time zones (tzdb), DST gaps, month-end anchoring and duration math
Code coverage instrumentation
compilers · low: Insert counters into compiled code to record which blocks, edges or lines ran; a spanning tree of the control-flow graph cuts the counters needed.
›
Fast hash functions
data-structures · low: Non-cryptographic hashes built from 64×64→128-bit multiplies and xor-shifts; pick by key size, trust level and whether the hash is persisted.
›
Sanitizers
security · low: ASan/UBSan/TSan shadow memory and instrumentation to catch memory bugs
Bit packing and PFOR
compression · low: Store blocks of integers with exactly b bits each and patch rare outliers separately (PFOR); the fastest integer codec family, billions of values per second.
›
BM25 ranking
search-sort · low: The standard lexical relevance score: IDF-weighted term frequency with saturation (k1) and length normalization (b); default in Lucene, Elasticsearch and SQLite FTS5.
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Sorted-list intersection
search-sort · low: Intersect sorted id lists by merging, galloping from the short list into the long one, and skipping whole compressed blocks, shortest list first.
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Object storage
cloud · low: S3-compatible blob storage at cents per GB-month with 11 nines durability; pick by egress price, request price and latency, not by storage price alone.
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Copy on write snapshots
storage · low: Point-in-time snapshots by sharing pages/extents and copying only on write
Failure bisection
search-sort · low: Binary search over commits, batches or inputs to isolate a failure
Transparent interception
networking · low: Redirect traffic to a local proxy (iptables TPROXY/REDIRECT, eBPF) without app changes
Text normalization
machine-learning · low: Rewrite messy text into one canonical form for matchers and models, or into spoken words for speech output (and back), keeping a map to the original offsets.
›
Unicode text tokenization for search
search-sort · low: Turn multilingual text into index terms: segment words (UAX 29 style, CJK bigrams), normalize, case-fold and accent-fold, identically at index and query time.
›
AEAD (AES-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305)
security · low: Authenticated encryption that encrypts and detects tampering in one call; the only kind of symmetric encryption you should use.
›
Cryptographic hashes (SHA-2, BLAKE3)
security · low: Collision-resistant fingerprints of data; SHA-256 for interoperability, BLAKE3 for speed, HMAC/HKDF for keyed uses.
›
ECDH key exchange (X25519, P-256)
security · low: Each side multiplies the other's public curve point by its own scalar and both get the same point; always validate the peer key and run the result through a KDF.
›
HKDF key derivation (extract-and-ex…
security · low: HMAC-based two-step key derivation: extract a uniform pseudorandom key from any secret, then expand it into as many context-bound keys as you need.
›
X509 certificates
security · low: Certificate chains, path validation, SANs, revocation and short-lived issuance
Byte-pair encoding (BPE) tokenizati…
machine-learning · low: Learn a subword vocabulary by repeatedly merging the most frequent adjacent pair; byte-level BPE encodes any input losslessly with 32k-200k tokens.
›
Transformer block
ml-training · low: The decoder-only pre-norm block (attention plus MLP on a residual stream) behind every modern LLM, with exact shapes, parameter, FLOP and KV-cache counts.
›
Ebpf
hardware-os · low: Verified in-kernel programs on hooks (kprobes, XDP, tc) with maps
Ptrace process control
hardware-os · low: Ptrace: attach, read and write registers and memory, single-step, intercept signals
Seccomp bpf
security · low: Syscall filtering with seccomp BPF programs
fsync, O_DSYNC and O_DIRECT
hardware-os · low: What fsync, fdatasync, O_DSYNC, O_DIRECT and F_FULLFSYNC really guarantee on Linux and macOS, and the exact call sequences for crash-safe files.
›
LRU and CLOCK
systems · low: LRU evicts the least recently used entry via hash map plus linked list; CLOCK approximates it with a reference bit, so hits take no lock.
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S3-FIFO
systems · low: Three FIFO queues (small, main, ghost) that evict one-hit wonders quickly and keep reused objects; low miss ratios with no list moves on hits.
›
Control-flow graph
compilers · low: Split a linear instruction list into basic blocks and connect them by jumps; the graph every optimizer, SSA builder and dataflow pass walks.
›
Fencing tokens
distributed · low: A number that grows with every lock grant and is checked by the protected resource, so a paused ex-holder's late write is rejected.
›
Quadtree octree
geometry · low: Adaptive spatial subdivision trees for queries and level of detail; loose and linear variants
Space filling curves
geometry · low: Z-order/Morton (geohash) and Hilbert curves mapping multi-dimensional points to sortable keys
Minimum spanning tree
graphs · low: Cheapest set of edges connecting all vertices; Kruskal sorts edges and joins components with union-find, Prim grows one tree, Boruvka merges in parallel rounds.
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Union-find
graphs · low: Disjoint-set forest with union by size and path compression; merges sets and answers same-set queries in effectively constant time.
›
CRC32C checksums
hardware-os · low: The Castagnoli CRC-32 with dedicated instructions on x86 (SSE4.2) and ARMv8. It is the standard fast integrity check for storage blocks, logs and network frames.
›
SIMD programming
hardware-os · low: Process 4-16 lanes per instruction with AVX2, AVX-512 or NEON via Rust std::arch, with runtime dispatch and a portable fallback.
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Virtual memory and the TLB
hardware-os · low: How page tables and TLBs translate every address, what TLB reach means, and when 2 MiB or 1 GiB huge pages pay off on Linux.
›
LU and Cholesky factorization
numerics · low: Factor A = PLU (any square matrix, partial pivoting) or A = LLᵀ (SPD) once in O(n³), then solve each right-hand side in O(n²).
›
Newton root finding
numerics · low: Linearize at the guess and jump to the tangent root; quadratic convergence near a simple root, made robust by brackets (1D) or line search.
›
Top-k selection
search-sort · low: Keep the k best of n items without sorting all n - bounded min-heap for streams, quickselect for arrays, threshold pruning to skip most items.
›
Constant time code
security · low: Writing secret-dependent code without branches or memory lookups on secrets; constant-time compare and select
Csprng
security · low: OS-backed cryptographically secure random numbers (getrandom), and when a fast PRNG is not enough
Copy for AI
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