stelfer

I'm pretty sure the Guardtime product is a Merkle tree of timestamps. I'm also pretty sure whatever protocol they use to maintain it would _not_ be immediately recognized as a "blockchain" protocol. Of course the protocol can be modeled and checked. The question is why does anyone think that this activity can apply to "blockchains" in general. But, welcome to the world of industrial research funding.

Haven't read it carefully, so I might have missed the reference, but Barbara Liskov has described a very similar optimization for Viewstamped Replication[1]

[1] http://www.pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/vr-to-bft.pdf

The paper itself is a mess. It's very interesting but they aren't doing themselves any favors. They need to clean up the presentation and get rid of the distracting phrases like "fail epically".

Hope this means we get to see Voyage of the Mimi again.

It's times like this that I'm reminded that the world really needs more physicists.

Since everyone is getting called out on nits today, I'm going to point out that he calls "Combinatorial Problems and Exercises" a paper, which means that he's (a) not into combinatorics, because it's an important _book_ in the field; and (b) he can't be bothered to google the thing even though he's going to rip on Wright for referencing it.

I have no idea (or care really) about who is right but there's clearly epic trolling going on here.

Yep if you aren't looking at eBPF now you probably aren't doing it right. And BTW thanks for that Brendan.

One of my favorite tools! I've implemented many (too many) protocols with HSMs. I've also implemented lots with traditional FSMs. I've met people like me who have done both. Most would choose HSMs for most applications. If you're into SM compilers then they might not be that interesting (I'm not -- I like to see the logic in code that _I_ write).

As an exercise in seeing the advantages, take a look at a network protocol RFCs like for TCP, BGP or SIP, and redraw the state diagrams there as statecharts. I've found that HSMs help in the beginning when I'm understanding what I'm doing (how about finding omitted states!); in the middle as I'm implementing; and in the end, when I'm maintaining. In my experience they definitely commend themselves vis-a-vis FSMs in commando ops (i.e. parachute a smart engineer into hostile unknown territory and have them fix a broken state machine under heavy fire).

Of course, much depends on your HSM implementation itself. This book (http://www.state-machine.com/psicc/) is a good resource, though the last time I looked the code is sorta old-timey C++. There are definitely more contemporary/template-ly ways to do it.

"Latency Lags Bandwidth", Patterson 2004 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1022596

Article has it exactly backwards.

"In January, Netflix responded by hiring its first Washington lobbyist..." Oh my. Vaya con dios Lone Ranger.

Emacs mode in Eclipse? It has almost all of the navigation keystrokes.

As far as emacs not being everywhere, I recently just learned about mg on openbsd. If I had just rtfm I would have found it years ago.

Man I am tired of hearing what Zawinski thought about C++ fifteen freaking years ago. If you're good at C++, use it. If not, don't. If you want to get good at it, practice. How is that different from any language?

At home, in a distinct office, with a nice automatic espresso machine upstairs, so it's kind of like being in a coffee shop, only much cheaper and less distracting.

We just got a new block out of ARIN. The first thing we got in response to our net-isp was this:

"Your template indicates a projected need for additional IPv4 addresses in 12 months. The IANA IPv4 free pool is projected to be depleted sometime by January 2011. As a result, ARIN cannot assure you that additional IPv4 addresses will be available at that time. This will not affect your current IPv4 request, but applications and services that require ongoing availability of IP addresses should be migrated to IPv6."

Well luckily that's not even a remote possibility even in an alternate universe. They should stick to stuff they understand.

I read Gallmeister's POSIX.4 with great zeal.

I doubt you have spent time teaching undergraduate physics.

Your assertion that the male students might have dropped out because of the "frou-frou" exercise is easily construed as chauvinistic.

Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior to your male peers.

But here's a hypothetical for you. You come to my company for a job interview.

When you come see me, I ask you what your favorite subject is and I let you talk about it for twenty minutes. Then we start talking about the job.

When you see Bob next door, he immediately starts drilling on topic.

Which interview do you perform better on?

Pretty much everyone who I looked up to who was an X and said: "You should be an X".

I was sort of interested, but...

Of the many activities in life for which prior experience are essential for success: buying assets out of bankruptcy; re-tasking a communications satellite...

So, I perused the bios, and I'm just really not convinced that they could pull it off. Looks like a bunch of smart and really well meaning (young) people. Needs more billionaire greybeard.

No doubt the future is streaming. But it won't be from Netflix for at least three reasons.

They have very little to zero leverage for content deals.

They've already chased the market to the bottom on pricing.

But most of all, they're just another over the top broadband service. NN is going nowhere. One day real soon now, Ma Bell is coming a knocking for $4 of that $8. They don't "own" the customer in the telecom sense, and that's all that really matters today, tomorrow, and forever in the US.

I've learned over the years that if I come up with something useful as I try to fall asleep, instead of hopping out of bed, I just consciously save it for the morning. It's like waking up with a gift. And often the brain has done some useful offline optimizing.

To shut down the problem-solving machinery I usually fantasize about being starting point guard for the Lakers. May sound silly for a grown man, but it works for me.

killer app != favorite app. And Android doesn't need a killer app at this point.

Play may be Scala killer app IMO

In general I don't like this approach to learning. I feel like it's counter to the rule that you shouldn't reward kids for things they should be expected to do.

That being said, he says clearly that this is about learning math facts. The are the one rote part left in the early math curriculum. It's going to be painful for most kids. I know this from very recent experience. Anything you can do to help I think is advantageous.

He should not have titled his post as he did. It should have been titled "How to get any 3rd grader to learn their math facts more efficiently". I think that's what he meant to say anyway.

Here's mine: http://gist.github.com/618459

I didn't see the point in doing this in anything but C. I tried it without cheating, and to make it as interesting to myself as possible. Also did it after a week of writing briefs, so that was a nice way to unwind from that! Pretty Fun.

Anyway, if I'm applying for a job (which I wasn't), the last thing I'm going to do is send in a bunch of one-liners.