_vvhw

25 ms·

181.
by _vvhw 5y ago
I understood my comment to be providing a counter-example, an exception to the rule, in the context of "all patents".
182.
by _vvhw 5y ago
I believe the patent thicket argument holds and has merit, whether you restrict the context to software patents or enlarge the context to most industries. Let's also not forget the broader context here, which is software patents.
183.
by _vvhw 5y ago
It's an interesting idea but would probably have harmful second order effects — a government sanctioned patent gold rush. Abolishing the root cause would be better. And if this was done, then yes, government buyouts and release of exis
184.
by _vvhw 5y ago
And now everybody is distracted, when they could be innovating software. "It’s not true that you will always need to put up the money yourself." I don't believe this was my argument. I simply said "capital".
185.
by _vvhw 5y ago
The reality is that in software, relative to the vast armada of the patent thicket that could be employed against you, a single patent affords little protection.
186.
by _vvhw 5y ago
Except that today, the promotion of progress of software is most advanced by open-source, and most damaged by patents.
187.
by _vvhw 5y ago
You're assuming that once you have a patent, you're protected. When in fact, you still need capital to defend your patent in litigation. It's turtles all the way down.
188.
by _vvhw 5y ago
"A weird throwback to some past society" rings true, especially insofar as the world now has a central knowledge repository—the Internet. Stopping software patents as a first step would set a precedent and provide a beachhead.
189.
by _vvhw 5y ago
It's interesting as you say, since Brian Oki's VSR would pioneer consensus in 1988, a year before Paxos, and James Cowling's and Barbara Liskov's 2012 revision of VSR would also be ahead of RAFT by 2 years, and with an e
190.
by _vvhw 5y ago
If you can avoid multithreading in the design of your consensus protocol, this also means that your implementation becomes more deterministic. If you can have the design fully deterministic by stubbing out the message passing, storage and t
191.
by _vvhw 5y ago
Aleksey Charapko's DistSys Reading Group had an interesting discussion on RAFT, Paxos and Viewstamped Replication recently, where I was able to present James Cowling's 2012 revision of VSR: http://charap.co/reading
192.
Hello Serverless World(blog.convex.dev)
1 points by _vvhw 5y ago|0 comments
193.
by _vvhw 5y ago
This is what I appreciate about another aspect Zig, checked arithmetic, which is on by default in safe release builds. For example, if a u64 would overflow through addition, then instead of just allowing the addition to wrap the u64 around
194.
by _vvhw 5y ago
Sure, I guess there are cases where O(n²) is okay and sometimes even faster, but in my experiences with those runtimes I've usually typically regretted it. It tends to come back and bite as your original comment made clear. I prefer O(
195.
by _vvhw 5y ago
I agree with you in general, but O(n²) is always dangerous. Perhaps this example you give is a little to the extreme. Writing slow software is also a form of waste. Then it becomes a question of ranking waste and getting rid of the most was
196.
by _vvhw 5y ago
Ah, good catch, thanks! I guess this could either be fixed up later with a simple check at the end, also linear, just in case it ever happens, or even just a condition whilst placing gates, that they can't be directly opposite the last
197.
by _vvhw 5y ago
It's a form of warrant canary?
198.
by _vvhw 5y ago
Thanks for sharing the challenge and so cool to see the follow up and your actual answer. Here's a linear solution I came up with, before I took a look at the rest of the thread: 1. Think of the 100x100 as pixels on a black background,
199.
by _vvhw 5y ago
I think the issue is with the scheme, this works: http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/vr-revisited.pdf
200.
by _vvhw 5y ago
Thanks to you too! I've also enjoyed this dialogue and it helps to formulate one's thoughts by writing them down. Roughly speaking, there are two big ideas (or three, if we count deterministic snapshots, but let's not go into
201.
by _vvhw 5y ago
> This isn’t a showstopper event, it’s a process stopper event. Again, the PAR paper describes the specific examples where a single disk sector failure on a single replica can be a showstopper event — for the whole cluster, even precludi
202.
by _vvhw 5y ago
> Well, there are many ways to skin this particular cat Sure, of course, but why shouldn't we implement the easy wins as well? PAR is pretty simple to implement. It's not exclusive to other techniques, and it increases availabi
203.
by _vvhw 5y ago
> My risk model prefers replacing any disk that is encountering unrecoverable errors, to avoid the disk causing additional problems as it degrades (no matter how good your error detection is, it is preferable not to lean on it more often
204.
by _vvhw 5y ago
> Probably the most general purpose course of action is to replace the node, since nodes are plentiful. The faulty node can then have its disk replaced before being returned to the pool of available nodes. This is expensive and wasteful,
205.
by _vvhw 5y ago
"So all that is required for correctness is that a process fail-stops in the presence of a detectable disk fault." Yes, except the PAR paper goes into many more storage faults. Recovering from these is not trivial and needs to be
206.
by _vvhw 5y ago
I would say that the majority of leader-based state machine replication protocols today are based on the more popular RAFT, which is itself a derivative of Viewstamped Replication. At least most leader-based consensus implementations that I
207.
by _vvhw 5y ago
"Isn't the whole point of consensus to get around discrepancies due to faults in individual devices" Yes, but only with respect to the fault models actually adopted, proven, implemented and tested. Again, most formal proofs,
208.
by _vvhw 5y ago
“Paxos is one of the first and most celebrated ideas that laid the foundation for how different things come to an agreement asynchronously” “Most—if not all—consensus algorithms fundamentally derive concepts from Paxos” It's not well k
209.
by _vvhw 5y ago
This is probably one of the best motivations for a distributed database that I've read. I find that it's not often that people grasp that distribution is about availability. It's obvious when you say it, but for a long time m
210.
by _vvhw 5y ago
Here's the companion talk by Pat Morin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1qRcDnbihA The Eytzinger layout and search has got to be the coolest data structure and most elegant algorithm I've learned in a long time.

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