The Weekly Weird - 2015-09-11
- Bitcoinfreude continues!
- I find CockroachDB fascinating. Talk about throwing out the received wisdom re product naming. (HN comments) Though of course until Aphyr takes a look at it I assume it sends all data to China and then replaces it with pictures of ugly babies. The authors seem to feel similarly as it's listed as a requirement for their 1.0 release.
- A Gentle Introduction to Lockless Concurrency (See also the discussion on the Mechanical Sympathy mailing list)
- What kind of programmer uses bcrypt and then stores the same data's md5? Ashley Madison's programmers, that's who
- From the things-that-just-shouldnt-be-done department: Stock trading from vim(!) What's next, building a trading system with ncurses? Lol.
- It's a bit obscure but I really feel like QA had a good chance to catch this: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/07/this-hilarious-cisco-fail-is-a-network-engineers-worst-nightmare/ (this is actually a few years old but gift horses, etc)
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Random Rust Roundup:
- Ok, the syntax isn't the best but pipes in rust! This was my biggest impedance mismatch coming from ocaml, time to start writing some rust again!
- There are some algorithms, particularly in the lock-free family, that really benefit from having a garbage collector, but it turns out there's no reason you can't just 'garbage collect' the bits you care about
- Of course, having all that rich, chewey type information gives you lots of options if you wanted to build an actual GC into rust.
- One nice thing about "doing everything at compile time" is you can overoptimize things like compiling regexes into machine code and type check your SQL statements
- And, of course, the language focus on safety and correctness has a nice ecosystem effect of attracting projects with similar values. Or, what do you mean security code should be small and easy to use?!
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I particularly enjoy reading about the sort of mundane 101 level stuff involved in using a framework, like this, for a green thread implementation (sounds like Async to me...)
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Everything you never wanted to know about AWS' spot instances
- A little bit of cold war history is going away: The Glomar Explorer is being scrapped. The story behind this one begs belief, the CIA built a ludicrously complicated boat to retrieve a soviet submarine from the ocean floor with a giant claw and, of course, mostly failed. There's a good documentary that's no longer on Netflix but scenes from which are on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFWMo7aHDRo and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlugDBianlI
- You know what makes me real fucking happy? The phrase Directed Energy Planetary Defense. Just imagine that it's someone's job shoot a laser at a spinning rock. IEEE Spectrum has a bit more detail, including timelines for redirecting nontrivial-sized impactors. It looks like this is just a straight-up continuous beam, I imagine you could save some power by pulsing your laser only when you're going to hit a spot you've already warmed up. The same group is working on laser powered spaceships.
- Of course, if we can get that asteroid into a non-species-threatening place, we might want to send a happy little cube up there to explore. Three reaction wheels can accomplish a fair bit and it's easy to imagine that they might be able to team up.
- If you know me you know I'm the least 'sports' person alive. Here's a video of tennis.