Saturday, October 4, 2014

Summertime reading

Boy, I'm all over the place recently.

Must be the 90 degree temperatures.

Or all the candy corn I've been eating...

  • Play the Backstay
    Simply put, the backstay can bend the mast when tightened and straighten the mast when loose. Looking specifically at the mainsail, this can affect the fullness or draft as well as the twist of the mainsail.
  • PCC: Re-architecting Congestion Control for Consistent High Performance
    The design rationale behind TCP’s hardwired mapping is to make assumptions about the packet-level events. When seeing a packet-level event, TCP assumes the network is in a certain state and thus tries to optimize the performance by triggering a predefined control behavior as response to that assumed network state. However, in real network, the observed packet-level events are often not a result of the assumed network condition. When this assumed link breaks, TCP still mechanically carries out the mismatched control response and severely degraded performance follows.
  • That's not an unreasonable approach.
    When I came up with the original approach to congestion control in TCP 30 years ago (see Internet RFCs 896 and 970), TCP behavior under load was so awful that connections would stall out and fail. The ad-hoc solutions we put in back then at least made TCP well behaved under load.
  • Why is 0x00400000 the default base address for an executable?
    In order to make context switching fast, the Windows 3.1 virtual machine manager "rounds up" the per-VM context to 4MB. It does this so that a memory context switch can be performed by simply updating a single 32-bit value in the page directory.
  • 'Bloodletting' at Downtown Project with Massive Layoffs
    For a time, it has seemed as if the growth would never stop in Downtown Las Vegas: land purchases, new businesses and development at every turn, most of it driven by Downtown Project, the redevelopment group funded by a $350 million investment from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.
  • Founder Suicides
    And yesterday, the suicide article - The Downtown Project Suicides: Can the Pursuit of Happiness Kill You? - appeared. It’s a rough one that talks about three suicides – Jody Sherman (4/13), Ovik Banerjee (1/14), and Matt Berman (4/14) – all people involved in the Vegas Tech phenomenon.
  • A State of Xen - Chaos Monkey & Cassandra
    “When we got the news about the emergency EC2 reboots, our jaws dropped. When we got the list of how many Cassandra nodes would be affected, I felt ill. Then I remembered all the Chaos Monkey exercises we’ve gone through. My reaction was, “Bring it on!”.” - Christos Kalantzis - Engineering Manager, Cloud Database Engineering
  • Apache Derby 10.11.1.1 released
    The Apache Derby project is pleased to announce feature release 10.11.1.1.
  • After raising $50M, Reddit forces all remote workers to relocate to SF
    Wong chimed in on Twitter with confirmation of the new employee policy, which he said was decided independent of the new investment. “Intention is to get whole team under one roof for optimal teamwork. Our goal is to retain 100 percent of the team,” he said.
  • reddit
    it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time. We have some creative thoughts about the mechanics of this, but it’ll take us awhile to sort through all the issues. If it works as we hope, it’s going to be really cool and hopefully a new way to think about community ownership.
  • Before the Startup
    Startups are very counterintuitive. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just because knowledge about them hasn't permeated our culture yet. But whatever the reason, starting a startup is a task where you can't always trust your instincts.
  • HFT In My Backyard: The Office
    The Wavre tower is the third tallest structure in Belgium. Once again, I parked my car from the tower and walked through the fields. Some techs were working at the top of the 250 meter tower, but they looked tiny from my vantage point on the ground. Unlike the Houtem tower, which needs guy wires to remain erect, the Wavre tower is a beautiful “standing structure”
  • A technological solution to best execution and excessive market complexity
    We believe there is a way for regulation to be simplified and made more powerful at the same time. Trade publication standards can be created to support improved customer choice and to simplify and strengthen the market place. This would replace the need for more complex and costly regulation. Our suggestions apply to both the USA and to Europe but this paper will concentrate on the unique market structure of the U.S. equity markets after Regulation NMS (Reg NMS).
  • How does SQLite work? Part 1: pages!
    Modifying open source programs to print out debug information to understand their internals better: SO FUN.
  • Peter Thiel's Zero to One Might Be the Best Business Book I've Read
    Thiel, a founder of PayPal and the data analytics firm Palantir, might be best known for his idiosyncrasies, which helped inspire the character of Peter Gregory in the HBO series Silicon Valley. Indeed, the recipients of Thiel's donations seem torn from the pages of a Philip K. Dick novel: an anti-aging biotech firm, an organization dedicated to building ocean communities underwater, and a foundation that pays teenagers to drop out of college and start new companies. Say what you want about the Thielian future of cyborg teenagers living for 200 years in pressurized cabins under the Caribbean; this is not a man to be faulted for thinking too small.
  • The NSA And Me
    More than three decades later, the NSA, like a mom-and-pop operation that has exploded into a global industry, now employs sweeping powers of surveillance that Frank Church could scarcely have imagined in the days of wired phones and clunky typewriters. At the same time, the Senate intelligence committee he once chaired has done an about face, protecting the agencies from the public rather than the public from the agencies.
  • “Not” Neutrality?
    the reason the interconnect utilization between Level 3 and LEC1 and LEC3 improved is that these LECs forced Netflix to pay them to interconnect directly with them. And as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has pointed out several times, Netflix didn’t do that because they were taking advantage of a highly competitive Internet marketplace. They did it because they had no choice: all third-party content that LEC broadband users want to see eventually has to go through LEC interconnection points. When the LEC tries to turn these interconnection points into Internet tollbooths there is no alternate path for the content to take to reach the consumers.
  • Thirteen Ways of Looking at Greg Maddux: A World Series Requiem
    I can't think of Jason today, or of the days leading up to his death, without thinking of Greg Maddux. And I can't think of Maddux without thinking of Verducci. With Maddux's Hall of Fame induction this summer, after having not opened the trunk in years, I cracked it open, brushed the dust off Verducci's article, and found the movie of my memory experiencing technical difficulties.

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