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Consumer applications
real-estate-listings
real-estate listing search
Zillow, Rightmove
System
Techniques · 31
Primitives · 99
real-estate-listings
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.
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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.
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Incremental sync cursors
distributed · medium: The client keeps one opaque token; each pull returns only the changes after it plus the next token, so sync cost scales with what changed, not with the dataset.
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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.
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Address geocoding
geometry · medium: Parse, normalize and fuzzy-match postal addresses to coordinates and back
Address parsing
geometry · medium: Split free-text addresses into components (house, street, city, postcode) with rules or a sequence model
Kriging spatial interpolation
geometry · medium: Variogram-based kriging and IDW to interpolate sampled field values onto grids
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.
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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.
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Hdr histogram
data-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentiles
Loan amortization
finance · low: Annuity, interest-only and balloon schedules with exact rounding of the final payment
Map tile pyramid
geometry · low: Z/x/y tile pyramids, quadkeys and overviews for multi-resolution maps and imagery
Vector tile encoding
geometry · low: Mapbox Vector Tile protobuf: zigzag-delta geometry commands, layers and feature attributes
Image resampling filters
graphics · low: Resize an image by convolving with a kernel (box, triangle, cubic, Lanczos) whose width scales with the shrink factor, done as two separable 1-D passes with precomputed weights.
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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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Quantile regression
machine-learning · low: Predicting quantiles with the pinball loss for probabilistic forecasts and prediction intervals
Image codecs
media · low: JPEG (DCT, Huffman), PNG, HEIF/AVIF decoding and encoding fundamentals
Boolean expression indexing
search-sort · low: Indexing conjunctive targeting expressions so one event finds all matching ads/subscriptions fast
Mutual TLS
security · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.
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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.
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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.
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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
+ 24 more techniques
+ 83 more primitives
System
Techniques · 31
Primitives · 99
real-estate-listings
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.
›
Incremental sync cursors
distributed · medium: The client keeps one opaque token; each pull returns only the changes after it plus the next token, so sync cost scales with what changed, not with the dataset.
›
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
Address parsing
geometry · medium: Split free-text addresses into components (house, street, city, postcode) with rules or a sequence model
Kriging spatial interpolation
geometry · medium: Variogram-based kriging and IDW to interpolate sampled field values onto grids
Label placement collision
geometry · medium: Place map labels and icons without overlap using a collision grid and priorities
Gradient-boosted decision trees (GB…
machine-learning · medium: Add small regression trees one at a time, each fitted to the loss gradient; histogram splits over 256 bins make it the strongest tabular default.
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Learning to rank
machine-learning · medium: Train a scorer on query-grouped data so that the order it induces maximizes NDCG; LambdaMART (boosted trees with NDCG-weighted pair gradients) is the production default.
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Email delivery smtp
networking · medium: Outbound SMTP: queues, MX lookup, retries, bounces, feedback loops and IP warm-up
Mobile push delivery
networking · medium: Sending notifications through APNs and FCM: HTTP/2 requests, token hygiene, collapse keys, TTL and priority, and the retry rules that keep you un-throttled.
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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.
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Entity resolution
storage · medium: Decide which records describe the same real-world thing: block to cut the pair space, score pairs with a probabilistic model, cluster the matches transitively.
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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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Secondary indexes
storage · medium: Maintaining secondary and multikey indexes consistently with the primary data
Delta debugging
compilers · medium: Ddmin minimization of failing inputs or change sets
Durable job queue
distributed · medium: Persisted tasks that workers lease for a visibility timeout, ack on success and retry with backoff; at-least-once execution that survives worker and queue crashes.
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Fault injection
distributed · medium: Inject latency, errors, kills and partitions via proxies, netem or hooks
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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Bounce processing
networking · medium: Parse DSNs and feedback loops, classify hard/soft bounces, maintain suppression lists
Record linkage
search-sort · medium: Probabilistic record matching (Fellegi-Sunter) with blocking for patient or entity indexes
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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LSM-tree
storage · medium: Buffer writes in memory, flush them as immutable sorted files and merge in the background; turns random writes into sequential I/O.
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MVCC
storage · medium: Keep timestamped versions of each row so readers see a consistent snapshot without blocking writers; the default concurrency control in modern databases.
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Near-duplicate detection with MinHa…
machine-learning · medium: Estimate set Jaccard similarity from k min-hashes and find similar pairs with banded LSH buckets; the standard dedup for web crawls, training corpora and sequence collections.
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Linear-time regular expression matc…
search-sort · medium: Match a regular expression in O(pattern x text) worst case by tracking all live parse positions at once, then cache the state sets as a lazily built DFA for speed.
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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.
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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.
›
Hdr histogram
data-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentiles
Loan amortization
finance · low: Annuity, interest-only and balloon schedules with exact rounding of the final payment
Map tile pyramid
geometry · low: Z/x/y tile pyramids, quadkeys and overviews for multi-resolution maps and imagery
Vector tile encoding
geometry · low: Mapbox Vector Tile protobuf: zigzag-delta geometry commands, layers and feature attributes
Image resampling filters
graphics · low: Resize an image by convolving with a kernel (box, triangle, cubic, Lanczos) whose width scales with the shrink factor, done as two separable 1-D passes with precomputed weights.
›
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.
›
Quantile regression
machine-learning · low: Predicting quantiles with the pinball loss for probabilistic forecasts and prediction intervals
Image codecs
media · low: JPEG (DCT, Huffman), PNG, HEIF/AVIF decoding and encoding fundamentals
Boolean expression indexing
search-sort · low: Indexing conjunctive targeting expressions so one event finds all matching ads/subscriptions fast
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.
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Message sequence numbers
distributed · low: A per-stream counter on every message lets the receiver detect loss, duplicates and reordering, ack cheaply and resume after reconnect with "send from N".
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Cursor pagination
networking · low: Keyset/opaque-cursor pagination for stable incremental reads from APIs and tables
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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.
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k-d tree
geometry · low: A binary tree that splits k-dimensional points by one coordinate per level, giving fast nearest-neighbour and box queries on static low-dimensional data.
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Gaussian processes
machine-learning · low: GP regression with kernels: posterior mean/variance via Cholesky, hyperparameters by marginal likelihood
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).
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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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Spatial hashing
physics · low: Uniform grid stored in a hash table: bucket objects by cell, test only neighbouring cells; O(n) neighbour search for many similar-sized objects such as particles.
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Quantile sketches
data-structures · low: Mergeable quantile sketches: t-digest, DDSketch, HDR histograms
Loss functions
machine-learning · low: The scalar a model minimizes: cross-entropy for classes and tokens, MSE or Huber for values, each with a stable form and simple gradient.
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Regularization
machine-learning · low: Techniques that trade training fit for generalization: weight decay, dropout, early stopping, label smoothing and data mixing, with the exact update rules and defaults.
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Evaluation metrics
machine-learning · low: Precision, recall, ROC AUC, average precision, log loss, NDCG and pass@k computed correctly, plus paired confidence intervals for comparing models.
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SPF, DKIM and DMARC sender authenti…
networking · low: SPF authorizes sending IPs, DKIM signs the message, DMARC requires either to match the visible From domain and says what to do on failure.
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DNS message format and client looku…
networking · low: Binary query/response format of DNS (RFC 1035) and how a stub client uses it: record types, name compression, UDP/TCP/EDNS sizes, TTL caching.
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Smtp protocol
networking · low: SMTP/ESMTP sessions, pipelining, STARTTLS and reply codes
Exponential backoff with jitter
systems · low: Retry after delays that grow geometrically and are randomized, so failed clients spread out instead of hammering a recovering service in synchronized waves.
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Token bucket
systems · low: A bucket of up to b tokens refilled at rate r; requests spend tokens, enforcing an average rate while allowing bursts of b.
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HTTP/2
networking · low: Binary multiplexed framing for HTTP over one TCP connection: streams, per-stream and per-connection credit windows, HPACK header compression and the limits that contain abuse.
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JSON Web Token (JWT)
security · low: A signed, URL-safe token carrying claims; the verifier's job is the checklist (pinned algorithm, key by kid, exp, aud, iss), not the format.
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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.
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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.
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Sanitizers
security · low: ASan/UBSan/TSan shadow memory and instrumentation to catch memory bugs
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.
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Embeddings
machine-learning · low: A learned table mapping discrete ids to dense vectors: gather forward, sparse scatter-add backward, row-wise optimizers to keep huge tables cheap.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
B+ tree
storage · low: Balanced high-fanout search tree with all values in linked leaves; the default on-disk index for point lookups and range scans.
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Failure bisection
search-sort · low: Binary search over commits, batches or inputs to isolate a failure
Dead-letter queue
distributed · low: A side queue for messages that keep failing: after N delivery attempts or a permanent error, park them with the reason so the main queue keeps moving.
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Idempotency keys
finance · low: Client-chosen unique key per logical operation, stored with a request fingerprint and the final response, so retries replay the first result instead of acting twice.
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Transparent interception
networking · low: Redirect traffic to a local proxy (iptables TPROXY/REDIRECT, eBPF) without app changes
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.
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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.
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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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Mime parsing
storage · low: RFC 5322/2045 headers, multipart bodies and transfer encodings
Sliding-window counters
systems · low: Count events in the last W seconds with a ring of sub-bucket counters; the two-bucket weighted estimate gives rate limits in 16 bytes per key.
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Linear and logistic regression
machine-learning · low: Fit a weighted sum of features to a number (least squares) or a probability (logistic); the baseline every model must beat.
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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.
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Cryptographic hashes (SHA-2, BLAKE3)
security · low: Collision-resistant fingerprints of data; SHA-256 for interoperability, BLAKE3 for speed, HMAC/HKDF for keyed uses.
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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.
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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.
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X509 certificates
security · low: Certificate chains, path validation, SANs, revocation and short-lived issuance
Rolling hash
data-structures · low: Rabin-Karp polynomial rolling hashes and winnowing for substring fingerprints and document matching
Swiss table
data-structures · low: Open-addressing hash table that filters 8-16 slots at once with 1-byte hash tags and SIMD, giving fast lookups at 87.5 % load.
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Recursive-descent parsing
compilers · low: Hand-written top-down parser with one function per grammar rule; simple, fast, with full control over error messages and recovery.
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Aho-Corasick multi-pattern matching
search-sort · low: Find all occurrences of many fixed patterns in one pass over the text, in time independent of the pattern count, using a trie with failure links.
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SIMD substring search
search-sort · low: Find bytes or substrings by comparing 16-64 haystack positions per instruction against the needle's first and last byte, then verifying the rare candidates.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Convolution image filters
graphics · low: Separable 2D convolution kernels for blur, sharpen (unsharp mask) and edges with border handling
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.
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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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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.
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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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AdamW
ml-training · low: Adam's per-parameter adaptive steps with weight decay applied directly to the weights; the default optimizer for transformers and LLM pretraining.
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Reverse-mode automatic differentiat…
ml-training · low: Record the forward computation on a tape, then sweep it backwards once to get the gradient of a scalar loss for all inputs.
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L-BFGS
numerics · low: Quasi-Newton minimizer that approximates the inverse Hessian from the last m gradient differences via the two-loop recursion; O(m·n) memory and work per step.
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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.
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Parallel prefix sum
search-sort · low: Work-efficient scan (Blelloch, decoupled look-back) on CPU SIMD and GPUs; stream compaction
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.
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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
Bootstrap confidence intervals
statistics · low: Resampling-based confidence intervals for arbitrary statistics
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