mjb

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331.
by mjb 7y ago
Nice writeup! > The VMM emulates some interesting hardware: a device that can read the latest tweet from Command Line Magic’s Twitter handle, a device that can get the weather from certain cities, another device that can read fetch the
332.
AWS Lambda Cold Start Language Comparisons(levelup.gitconnected.com)
20 points by mjb 7y ago|11 comments
333.
by mjb 7y ago
Having contempt for your customers is not a good long-term business strategy. Some people get away with it for a while, but eventually they get found out.
334.
by mjb 7y ago
This is a great book, and while FreeBSD and Linux differ in a lot of ways, there are enough similarities to make it worth reading even if you're only interested in Linux.
335.
by mjb 7y ago
> All too often, it's used to excuse systemic failings and avoid investigating the deeper causes of safety incidents. Completely agree. But I don't think avoiding the term "operator error" (or human error, pilot error
336.
by mjb 7y ago
I've always found this story fascinating, because it's such a clear example of the role of operator error in safety. Both Daghlian and Slotin were experts in the work they were doing, and both were well aware of the danger of gett
337.
by mjb 7y ago
I work in this space, and the reason I do that is because I believe we can (and should!) make it fundamentally easier to build big distributed systems. Today's serverless offerings (including compute services like AWS Lambda, databases
338.
by mjb 7y ago
Right. I like to make a distinction here between "hard state" which needs to be persistent for correctness, and "soft state" which just needs to be around often enough for efficiency. Lambda's function re-use behavi
339.
by mjb 7y ago
Much of this is so overstated as to be wrong. > runbooks, etc actually provide little value in preventing incidents. There's a great deal of evidence that checklists have value in preventing accidents of omission. In some systems we
340.
Kindness, Wickedness and Safety(brooker.co.za)
1 points by mjb 7y ago|0 comments
341.
by mjb 7y ago
The defininition from Herlihy and Wing ( https://cs.brown.edu/~mph/HerlihyW90/p463-herlihy.pdf ), page 471. More informally, aphyr's definition from https://aphyr.com/posts/313-strong-consi
342.
by mjb 7y ago
Sorry, I think I was confusing LLVM's 'monotonic' with 'atomic'. The docs ( https://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#ordering ) say: > In addition to the guarantees of unordered, there is a single t
343.
by mjb 7y ago
That's part of the point he's making, though. To reject this case in a distributed database needs some additional concepts. From the article: > Whichever transaction is second --- when it reads the balance --- it must read the
344.
by mjb 7y ago
Part of the problem here is the confusion in terms between the databases world and the distributed systems world. "Consistency" has very different meanings in each, and "atomic" frequently has different practical meaning
345.
AWS VPC and Link Encryption(twitter.com)
2 points by mjb 7y ago|0 comments
346.
Chernobyl – Why INSAG has still got it wrong (1995)(neimagazine.com)
1 points by mjb 7y ago|0 comments
347.
by mjb 7y ago
This is good work, and the lock semantics and fencing token (epoch) make a lot of sense. I can't help but think that implementing java.util.concurrent.locks.Lock will turn out to be a liability. The problem here is that the code looks
348.
by mjb 7y ago
gvisor is a fundamentally different thing from Firecracker (or the role QEMU or NEMU play when used with KVM). There's a pretty good summary here: https://gvisor.dev/docs/architecture_guide/
349.
by mjb 8y ago
Many formal methods have a much simpler mathematical foundation than Haskell. For example, for TLA+ the background includes mostly (basic) set theory, basic logic, and some additional bits of temporal logic. Some methods do require a lot mo
350.
by mjb 8y ago
Some background reading that may make this help makes sense to folks from outside the domain: https://www.ozlabs.org/~rusty/virtio-spec/virtio-paper.pdf Block storage (virtio-block) is way simpler than file system
351.
by mjb 8y ago
> different engineers found TLA+ or PlusCal easier to learn That continues to be my experience. It varies both by engineer, and (as you point out) domain. Also, as I said in a sibling comment, it’s also important to think about what peop
352.
by mjb 8y ago
One advantage of PlusCal is that it’s super easy and convenient to experiment with which operations need to be atomic and isolated than it is in raw TLA+. In pluscal, you can just move labels around, and try out “if the system could crash b
353.
by mjb 8y ago
I think it is worth a discussion. I simply meant that adding simple macros wouldn't make TLA+ typed, and so wouldn't make the people who think TLA+ should be typed any happier than they are today.
354.
by mjb 8y ago
I agree with a lot of that, but in practice some syntactic sugar around types in TLA+ (or at least canned type invariant macros) would make it easier to write concise readable specs. Think "x is a natural number", "y is a mem
355.
by mjb 8y ago
The 1000 concurrency is a default limit, and we're very happy to raise it if you need more. The instructions for a limit increase request are here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/concurrent-
356.
by mjb 8y ago
That's very dependent on the drive vendor, model, and even firmware version. In many cases, drives can go on working for a very long time after the SMART metrics show it has failed. Whether you want to take the "risk" depends
357.
by mjb 8y ago
This article seems to be making two arguments. One is that popular blog software was limiting, and its popularity discourages people from trying other forms of content. Its a reasonable take, but it's not clear to me that's actual
358.
by mjb 9y ago
I'm not sure how PHP integrates with common web servers today, because I've been pretty disconnected from that world for a decade, but at least you should be able to use the same mechanism to call the PHP runtime from your Node sh
359.
by mjb 9y ago
"A bit too eager to criticize others" is a understatement. Taleb has a lot of interesting things to say, and some of them are even reasonably novel. Unfortunately his general "everybody but me is stupid" approach makes h
360.
by mjb 9y ago
Event-driven and serverless are related, but distinct ideas. Event-driven architectures can be built in a datacenter, on virts, in containers, or on serverless. On the other hand, serverless architectures don't necessarily need to be e

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