Month: February 2016

Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt

~ adriancolyer ~ 9 Comments

Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt - Sculley et al. 2014 Today's paper offers some pragmatic advice for the developers and maintainers of machine learning systems in production. It's easy to rush out version 1.0 the authors warn us, but making subsequent improvements can be unexpectedly difficult. You very much get the … Continue reading Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt

Distributed Consistency and Session Anomalies

~ adriancolyer ~ 13 Comments

Since we've spent the last couple of days sketching anomaly diagrams and looking at isolation levels, I wanted to finish the week off with a quick recap of session anomalies and consistency levels for distributed stores. In terms of papers, I've drawn primary material for this from: Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations, and Linearizability … Continue reading Distributed Consistency and Session Anomalies

Generalized Isolation Level Definitions

~ adriancolyer ~ 5 Comments

Generalized Isolation Level Definitions - Adya et al. 2000 Following on from yesterday's critique of ANSI SQL isolation levels, today's paper also gives a precise definition of isolation levels - but does so in a way that is inclusive of optimistic and general multi-version concurrency control strategies instead of being dependent on locking. Where Berenson … Continue reading Generalized Isolation Level Definitions

Not-quite-so-broken TLS: lessons in re-engineering a security protocol specification and implementation

~ adriancolyer ~ 7 Comments

Not-quite-so-broken TLS: lessons in re-engineering a security protocol specification and implementation - Kaloper-Meršinjak et al. 2015 Update: fixed broken paper link above. On the surface this is a paper about a TLS implementation, but the really interesting story to me is the attempt to 'do it right,' and the techniques and considerations involved in that … Continue reading Not-quite-so-broken TLS: lessons in re-engineering a security protocol specification and implementation

IncludeOS: A minimal, resource efficient unikernel for cloud systems

~ adriancolyer ~ 2 Comments

IncludeOS: A minimal, resource efficient unikernel for cloud systems - Bratterud et al. 2015 There has been lots of excitement around unikernels over the last year, and especially with the recent acquisition of the Unikernel Systems team by Docker (MirageOS, Mergeable Persistent Data Structures, Jitsu: Just-in time summoning of Unikernels). Whereas MirageOS is built around … Continue reading IncludeOS: A minimal, resource efficient unikernel for cloud systems

Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures

~ adriancolyer ~ 2 Comments

Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures - Popek & Goldberg 1974. With thanks to Alfred Bratterud for pointing me at this paper. What exactly is a virtual machine? What does a virtual machine monitor do? And how do we now whether a given piece of hardware can support virtualization or not? In today's paper … Continue reading Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures

Ownership and Reference Counting Based Garbage Collection in the Actor World

~ adriancolyer

Ownership and Reference Counting Based Garbage Collection in the Actor World - Clebsch et al. 2015 Yesterday we looked at the reference capability based type system of the Pony language. Pony is a safe (data race free), fast actor language. Today we're looking at another aspect of how Pony achieves its speed and clean programming … Continue reading Ownership and Reference Counting Based Garbage Collection in the Actor World