mjb

38 ms·

361.
by mjb 9y ago
For most uses, database connection pooling (or, more accurately, keeping a connection per container), is the right practice to follow in Lambda. For many databases, creating a connection is expensive and slow, and amortizing those costs ove
362.
Fixing Faults in C and Java Source Code: Abbreviated vs. Full-Word Names(hillelwayne.com)
3 points by mjb 9y ago|0 comments
363.
by mjb 9y ago
Yeah, it's absolutely mind blowing. My last involvement with graphics programming was the 90s demoscene, and fill-rate was a massive constraint on doing cool things. Doing the amount of math these modern engines do per frame, let alone
364.
by mjb 9y ago
That's right. Make connections to databases (and most other things) the first time your Lambda handler runs, and stash them in a static/global variable for re-use on future runs. That allows you to amortize the cost of forming the
365.
by mjb 9y ago
I find it remarkable how that bread recipe wouldn't be at all out of place in a modern book. 60% hydration is a little lower than most craft bakeries are using, and 1% salt is also on the low side, but they are very much in range of wh
366.
by mjb 9y ago
Sadly ttyquake seems to be gone from the internet, but aaquake2 lives on: https://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/
367.
by mjb 9y ago
That was a good read, but I think the author's conclusion is a little bit too punchy (although it did make it a fun read). Figuring out how to scale-out non-trivial problems is difficult. Many of these scale-out solutions are going to
368.
by mjb 9y ago
> I wonder whether the academic publications are growing ever less relevant to practice. I think there are two topics here. One is whether academic research and work is becoming less relevant to practice. The other is whether the formali
369.
by mjb 9y ago
Proper consistent hashing will only move (on average) K/N assignments when going from N to N+1 servers, for K original assignments.
370.
by mjb 9y ago
> we won't have to worry about optics anymore Right, if you have phase information you have a lot more options for (cheaply) making a synthetic aperture that's way bigger than your possible physical aperture.
371.
by mjb 9y ago
The historical trend is that storage density grows faster than throughput, and throughput improves faster than latency.
372.
by mjb 10y ago
See, for example, Garay et. al: https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/765.pdf
373.
by mjb 10y ago
While we're here, it's also not true that all correct consensus protocols are Paxos. For example, Viewstamped Replication is correct, but a different algorithm (see https://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.5671v3.pdf ). The
374.
by mjb 10y ago
This is a very good analysis. I think it makes a slightly stronger argument about MultiPaxos than it needs to. There are other correct ways to use single-decree Paxos, as long as you recognize it's limitations. The true limitation is &
375.
by mjb 10y ago
I think the author is right that top-down technical solutions to social problems don't work. Their examples are compelling, and more come to mind. As you say, though, that doesn't extend to the argument that technology and social
376.
by mjb 10y ago
No, that's not true. A huge number of medical treatments and interventions have been developed - mostly over the last 100 years - that are way more beneficial than they are risky. Some treatments have side-effects. Some have unexpected
377.
by mjb 10y ago
SMART is a fantastic exercise in sensitivity and specificity. As backblaze is showing with this data, SMART stats have poor sensitivity, but what's much worse for those who run big fleets of drives is their poor specificity. Lots of he
378.
Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited(arxiv.org)
5 points by mjb 10y ago|0 comments
379.
by mjb 10y ago
See Lamport's "Cheap Paxos" and "Vertical Paxos" papers for a treatment of what seems like very similar ideas. Vertical Paxos describes using a 'configuration master' (or, possibly, a larger quorum on a la
380.
by mjb 10y ago
Phillip - have you tried making your database connection in 'static' code? With container re-use (see https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/container-reuse-in-lamb... ), you should see multiple invokes goi
381.
by mjb 10y ago
> Believe Ben Or's algorithm was first. Ben-Or's "Another Advantage of Free Choice" beat Rabin's "Randomized Byzantine Generals" by a couple of months in 1983. These algorithms show how much people over
382.
by mjb 11y ago
The only way to prevent these attacks is to force somebody to provide something of value to vote in the reputation system. That something of value could be energy (proof of work), time, money, their own reputation, tokens from a fixed walle
383.
by mjb 11y ago
> Sounds like they're trading the spark system (a pretty easy to maintain system) for a second piston/crankshaft/etc. Opposing pistons and compression ignition are (mostly) orthogonal optimizations. From years of working o
384.
by mjb 11y ago
It's an informal and humorous phrase the writer used to make the article less dry. They don't appear to be seriously claiming that people with advanced degrees are actually "super-brains".
385.
by mjb 11y ago
There's a critical difference between home fermenting and home canning. In home fermenting, you have living lactic acid bacteria of various kinds, and they out-compete the bad bacteria. You may help them along with some salt and acid.
386.
by mjb 11y ago
I highly recommend sousvide (or rather, a temperature controlled water bath) for eggs. For whole eggs, you can get fine-grained control over the texture of both white and yolk (see https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/t
387.
by mjb 11y ago
Nice. The down-range focus on the fenceposts is very good. Cross-range focus isn't as good, still impressive for a such a low-cost system. It'd be very interesting to see some images of a more target-rich environment. Radar, SAR,
388.
by mjb 11y ago
Absolutely. I made some graphs of different kinds of jitter approaches at http://www.awsarchitectureblog.com/2015/03/backoff.html . Simply backing off with delay does very little to spread out spikes of work, and c
389.
by mjb 11y ago
Those are fundamentally different things. Sharding is a scaling strategy for reads, writes and data size. It doesn't address durability (which many distributed databases do). It doesn't address the discoverability problem of how y
390.
by mjb 11y ago
Yeah, there are lots of similarities to Vertical Paxos. It also shares a lot van Renesse and Schneider's classic Chain Replication paper ( https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi04/tech/full_papers&#

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