Background

Recently, I needed to process some time-series data at work and perform downsampling. To do this, I dug into the LTTB (Largest-Triangle-Three-Buckets) and MinMaxLTTB algorithms.

Technically speaking, time-series downsampling generally falls into two categories¹:

• Characteristic Preserving: The goal is to keep statistical properties (like mean, variance, etc.) as consistent as possible before and after downsampling.
• Value Preserving: This approach selects representative data points directly from the raw dataset to preserve the overall visual shape.

Both LTTB and MinMaxLTTB are essentially value-preserving algorithms—their core objective is to retain the original trend and shape of the data after downsampling.

Background

In the age of AI coding, writing code is no longer the primary bottleneck. The harder challenge is guiding coding agents to produce high-quality implementations. This usually means providing high-level constraints—such as software architecture and design patterns—instead of low-level implementation details.

Because of this shift, I believe understanding these concepts has become more important than ever. Take design patterns as an example. Before you can ask a coding agent to apply a particular pattern, you need to understand what the pattern is, what problem it solves, and when it should be used. Only then can you describe your intent precisely in natural language.

Background

It has been roughly two months since Andre Karpathy released the LLM Wiki idea in his gist. And I have been using my LLM Wiki for over one month. Today, I’m writing this post to share my thoughts.

Before LLM Wiki emerged, I had already been using Obsidian extensively for several years to take a large number of notes—over 10,000 in total. The high count is largely due to my adherence to the principle of atomic notes, where I create a separate note for each logically self-contained concept. Over time, this has allowed me to build a personal knowledge system and benefit from the compounding effects of structured knowledge.

Background

As a programmer, it’s hard not to be struck by how rapidly AI-assisted software development has evolved over the past few years. In hindsight, there have been several distinct phases:

• LLM-Powered Tab Completion: Developers still wrote most of the code themselves, while LLMs mainly predicted what should come next. Representative examples include Tabline and Copilot
• Vibe Coding: Developers no longer write code line by line. Instead, they describe requirements in natural language and let LLMs perform cross-file modifications. Representative examples include Cursor and Claude
• Spec-Driven Development (SDD): Vibe coding comes with many issues, such as context drift and unstable software architecture, which make it difficult to deploy reliably in production environments. As a result, both the open-source community and the industry have started exploring approaches beyond prompt engineering to enable LLMs to generate stable, production-quality code over long sessions — rather than just producing AI slop. At the moment, SDD appears to be one of the most promising directions.

How does SDD solve Vibe Coding’s problems?

Backgroup

Web service platforms generate a large volume of unstructured logs. However, machine learning and data analysis require structured input.

Therefore, extracting structured information from unstructured logs is a critical problem. A naive approach is to use regular expressions to extract structured information. However, this method has some drawbacks¹

• The volume of logs is so large that manually crafting regex patterns is impractical.
• Logs may come from different components, each with its own log format.

The Drain algorithm was proposed in 2017. At that time, many log parsing algorithms focused on offline batch processing. However, logs in web service platforms are generated as a stream. Therefore, the drain algorithm focuses on online stream processing.

Suffix array

By definition, a suffix array (denoted as sa) contains the starting indices of all suffixes. It’s simply an int array where sa[i] represents the starting index of the corresponding suffix.

Taking fizzbuzz as an example, its suffix array is 4 0 1 5 7 3 6 2. The details are shown in the following table.

How to generate a suffix array

Naive way

Let $N$ represent the length of the string. The naive algorithm is straightforward: generate all possible suffixes and then sort them using an efficient sorting algorithm. This requires one sort iteration, which may involve $O(N log\ N)$ comparisons. In the worst case, each string comparison takes $O(N)$ time. Therefore, the overall time complexity would be

Intro

You probably encountered BM25 numerous times when reading papers from the LLM (RAG) or information retrieval domain. This algorithm is a ranking method that computes relevance scores for documents given a user query.

If you examine the BM25 formula carefully, you will notice its similarity to the classic TF-IDF. In fact, BM25 is an enhanced version of TF-IDF, as we’ll explore shortly.

The BM25

Before we dive into the mechanism of BM25, let’s establish some notations:

K-Means Algorithm

I recently used the K-Means algorithm for clustering in my work. While reviewing my notes on the topic, I decided to publish them online :)

K-Means is a clustering algorithm that assigns each sample to one of the $K$ clusters.

How does AK-Means algorithm work?

Data Preparation

K-Means algorithm relies on distance calculations, so data should be normalized to prevent features with larger scales from dominating the results. The normalization can be achieved by the Scikit-Learn library as follows.

Introduction

In my recent work, I’ve been analyzing the correlation between various features in Android APKs. These features include IP characteristics, URL attributes, permission settings, and more. Feature correlation refers to identifying relationships between different features from the data, such as certain feature combinations that frequently appear together.

Relying solely on manual analysis would be impractical given the massive dataset—that’s when I remembered an algorithm from my data mining course: the Apriori algorithm! :)

Background

Recently, at work, I’ve been working on setting up a LLM evaluation platform. There’s one particular scenario: we need to call an LLM API provided by another department to run model evaluations on a test dataset, but this LLM API has a rate limit of a maximum of 2 calls per second (2 RPS). Thus, my task essentially boils down to: How to maximize concurrency to speed up model evaluation while strictly adhering to the API rate limits. In this brief post, I will share my thoughts about approaching this task.

Intro

What’s a functor? You might use it daily without realizing it. For example, calling map on a collection means you’re using a functor.

This post explains functors from two perspectives: category theory and programming. By this end, you will have a deeper understanding of the concept.

Functor in category theory