mad44

Does anyone have any explanation or theories about the NVME SSDs pricing anomaly?

MongoDB Engineering Blog is shaping up well

https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/engineering-blo...

I had summarized this talk here: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-to-speak-by-pa...

And a couple more pearls from Prof. Winston here as well. https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/search?q=winston

Also Mahesh Balakrishnan (Yale, Facebook/Meta, Confluent) https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/search?q=mahesh

Marc Brooker @mjb https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mjb

I was also unhappy with emacs breaking across versions, but I learnt to adopt to the new and sane keyboard shortcuts for org mode. http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2024/01/dude-wheres-my-emac...

How I read a research paper https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read-researc...

It makes working across other slack workspaces inconvenient by adding another click to select another workspace.

Yes, the redesign sucks, it is hard to use.

I had written this in 2014 as a short introduction to Dijkstra's EWD notes. https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2014/09/revisiting-ewds.ht...

Distributed systems, database systems, writing, research, cloud computing

https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/09/sonification-for-mo...

Sonification for monitoring and debugging distributed systems

There it is in the post:

In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm. Diego Ongaro, John Ousterhout, Usenix ATC, 2014.

Public Service Announcement. Reading research papers is so important for your growth and career, please put in a process to do it at least once in a month or two. (I will try to write a blog post about why it is important, and how to go about it, since I see there is a big need for this.)

Papers We Love is a great resource, https://paperswelove.org/, if you like to get involved in a community to dip your feet into reading papers first.

the original text is not a mystical text beyond your comprehension; you too can engage with it and draw your own conclusions.

This! This is so important.

Here is what I wrote (oh, wow, 10 years ago) about the process I use for reading papers. I hope it helps people.

https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read-researc...

At https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/ I distill and summarize distributed systems and database systems research paper. I recently got over 600 posts.

The main benefit of the blog for me was to crystallize my understanding. Having forced myself to post in public, I try to write a simple and accessible summary. This leads me to realize the gaps in my understanding, and fill them. This also strengthens my understanding, because by explaining the work in my own words, I internalize the concepts better. When I revisit a paper I have read before, the difference between a paper I wrote a post about and one I just read for myself is clear as day and night. I have a much better recall about the paper I posted. For a paper I wrote a summary, I just go to my summary and am able to cache back in all my understanding of the paper to my brain with a quick re-read of my summary.

This being said, I also benefited in terms of networking and collaboration. Through the blog post discussions on Twitter, I made many friends who work on distributed systems and databases. I think the blog was also useful for getting me a sabbatical at Microsoft Azure CosmosDB in 2018.

Finally, it feels really good to share my learnings, and put my rough ideas in the open. I learn from other blogs, and it feels good to give back. Every couple months I would get an email, thanking me for my blog, and that means the world to me.

Is this a specific thing to ADHD? I do this a lot, and I am ADD, but I thought this is a common thing.

Our brains are like wireless radio receivers in that way: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2012/12/our-brains-are-rad...

Thank you for the explanation.

I get it now. It is all thanks to separating the operation as 1. agreeing on WAL, 2. executing after waiting all WAL agreements stabilizing.

There is a separation between the two. This can introduce waits (which could be theoretically unbounded for EPaxos but Tempo and Accord bounds this).

Maybe in some sense this is in the same spirit of Calvin's serializing WAL first and executing it later. But Accord avoids a single entity doing the serialization and achieves it via a leaderless Paxos approach which uses dependency graphs for WAL serialization, and later using another protocol for WAL execution after settlement.

Why is it not possible for r to take a dependency on w2 and no dependency on w1?

w2 may hit different nodes than w1 in a sharded database?

Or is the leader-Paxos approach in Accord operate over all nodes in the database regardless of the shards the keys fall into? (I guess that is the only explanation.) But then scalability of these global transactions would be limited, no?

Thank you for your detailed explanations.

Fine, here you go, with the line breaks

;; one sentence per line

(defun wrap-at-sentences ()

  "Fills the current paragraph, but starts each sentence on a new line."

  (interactive)

  (save-excursion

    ;; Select the entire paragraph.

    (mark-paragraph)

    ;; Move to the start of the paragraph.

    (goto-char (region-beginning))

    ;; Record the location of the end of the paragraph.

    (setq end-of-paragraph (region-end))

    ;; Wrap lines with 'hard' newlines (i.e., real line breaks).

    (let ((use-hard-newlines 't))

      ;; Loop over each sentence in the paragraph.

      (while (< (point) end-of-paragraph)

        ;; Determine the region spanned by the sentence.

        (setq start-of-sentence (point))

        (forward-sentence)

        ;; Wrap the sentence with hard newlines.

        (fill-region start-of-sentence (point))

        ;; Delete the whitespace following the period, if any.

        (while (char-equal (char-syntax (preceding-char)) ?\s)

          (delete-char -1))

        ;; Insert a newline before the next sentence.

        (insert "\n")))))

I had copied this Emacs macro just for doing that.

;; one sentence per line (defun wrap-at-sentences () "Fills the current paragraph, but starts each sentence on a new line." (interactive) (save-excursion ;; Select the entire paragraph. (mark-paragraph) ;; Move to the start of the paragraph. (goto-char (region-beginning)) ;; Record the location of the end of the paragraph. (setq end-of-paragraph (region-end)) ;; Wrap lines with 'hard' newlines (i.e., real line breaks). (let ((use-hard-newlines 't)) ;; Loop over each sentence in the paragraph. (while (< (point) end-of-paragraph) ;; Determine the region spanned by the sentence. (setq start-of-sentence (point)) (forward-sentence) ;; Wrap the sentence with hard newlines. (fill-region start-of-sentence (point)) ;; Delete the whitespace following the period, if any. (while (char-equal (char-syntax (preceding-char)) ?\s) (delete-char -1)) ;; Insert a newline before the next sentence. (insert "\n")))))

(global-set-key (kbd "M-j") 'wrap-at-sentences)

Replying to "Why Decentralization Matters"

https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/change-my-mind-abo...

https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2021/06/silent-data-corrup...

Three years ago, I had written this as a response. https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/change-my-mind-abo...

I don't see any better arguments, development put forth since then

Watch till the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG62zay3kck

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Liff The book is a "dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet, written by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.

Here is a summary of IPFS white paper http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/02/paper-review-ipfs-c...

The improvements announced are substantial.

Here is a summary of the main points http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-to-speak-by-pat...

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

I write about distributed algorithms (Paxos, ABD, chain replication), cloud computing systems (recent papers in systems conferences), distributed databases (consistency guarantees), and blockchains (mostly from distributed consensus perspective).

I also write about academic life, research advice, book reviews, and miscellaneous stuff.