HN user

tkhattra

2,048 karma

taj <dot> khattra <at> gmail <dot> com

Posts28
Comments45
View on HN
cacm.acm.org 2mo ago

A grounded conceptual model for ownership types in Rust

tkhattra
57pts2
xcancel.com 3mo ago

The Automation of Nonsense

tkhattra
3pts0
en.wikipedia.org 3mo ago

Michael Rabin has died

tkhattra
414pts90
multicians.org 4mo ago

Three Questions About Each Bug You Find (1989)

tkhattra
3pts0
queue.acm.org 8mo ago

Practical Security in Production

tkhattra
20pts1
3quarksdaily.com 9mo ago

The paradoxical efficient market hypothesis (2024)

tkhattra
95pts90
sol.sbc.org.br 1y ago

Compact representations for arrays in Lua [pdf]

tkhattra
67pts19
www.lua.org 1y ago

The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]

tkhattra
6pts0
www.tuhs.org 1y ago

What would early alternatives to C have been?

tkhattra
6pts3
maheshba.bitbucket.io 1y ago

The Art of Managing Skunks

tkhattra
2pts0
medium.com 1y ago

Byte Queue Limits: the unauthorized biography

tkhattra
27pts2
www.cs.columbia.edu 1y ago

Netnews: The Origin Story [pdf]

tkhattra
60pts5
docs.google.com 1y ago

Go Is for Firmware Too

tkhattra
3pts2
3quarksdaily.com 1y ago

The Paradoxical Efficient Market Hypothesis (2024)

tkhattra
1pts0
lamport.azurewebsites.net 1y ago

The Future of TLA+ [pdf]

tkhattra
195pts105
www.youtube.com 1y ago

Interview: John Ousterhout Reflects on "A Philosophy of Software Design" [video]

tkhattra
12pts0
arxiv.org 2y ago

Eight Transaction Papers by Jim Gray

tkhattra
45pts9
www.cs.dartmouth.edu 2y ago

Bing Chat Flunks Math [pdf]

tkhattra
2pts0
security.googleblog.com 2y ago

Capslock: What is your code capable of?

tkhattra
3pts0
amsterdam.nettime.org 3y ago

Al Gore and the Internet (2000)

tkhattra
2pts0
barroso.org 3y ago

A Brief History of Warehouse-Scale Computing (2021) [pdf]

tkhattra
2pts0
twitter.com 3y ago

Jacob Ziv has died

tkhattra
710pts87
www.cs.princeton.edu 3y ago

How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]

tkhattra
477pts163
www.youtube.com 3y ago

Ken Thompson's 75 year project

tkhattra
4pts0
ieeexplore.ieee.org 3y ago

The Origin of the “MIT License” (2020)

tkhattra
67pts19
randombytes.cr.yp.to 3y ago

Librandombytes – a public domain library for generating randomness

tkhattra
82pts77
twitter.com 3y ago

Fred Brooks has died

tkhattra
1516pts211
www.bwlampson.site 6y ago

Hints and Principles for Computer System Design

tkhattra
6pts0

i spent a couple of memorable weeks a few decades ago between jobs reading up on erlang, including joe armstrong's (RIP) wonderful phd thesis. when i started, erlang looked "strange" (i hadn't done much prolog in uni). but after being immersed in erlang for a few weeks, when i returned to look at some C/C++ code, they looked positively hideous compared to erlang's higher level functional, and prolog inspired pattern matching syntax.

i submitted it ~4 days ago with the title "Ken Thompson's 75 year project", but the title was evidently too boring to gain any traction :) (like some others have commented, the raspbian os "revelation" was the least interesting part for me too)

it was cool to hear that he's still working on chess endgames, an interest which goes back many decades too [1].

[1] https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/ken-games.html

yes, we use BEGIN IMMEDIATE with a 2 second busy timeout. that has a worst case wait time of 2 seconds, but the 95th percentile wait time is around 100 to 1000 microseconds and the 99th percentile is around 1 to 10 milliseconds. for a high throughput and/or low latency service, a worst case wait time of 2 seconds might be unacceptable, but it's fine in our case.

Only send writes from a single process

depending on your use case, using multiple writer processes can be fine, e.g. multiple writer processes storing periodic metrics (once per minute) into a single sqlite database. the occasional "database is locked" error (it does happen a few times a day) is handled by simply returning and trying again at the next interval. that's fine for this particular use case - the metrics for the last interval are just delayed a bit.

i don't think that's the text of the entire book - it looks like a scrape of the book's former website (www.programmingpearls.com).

bentley revised and updated some of his "programming pearls" columns and published them in 2 editions of books published circa 1986 and 2000. they are among my favorite computer science books, and a great companion to more theoretical data structures, algorithms, and software engineering texts. a great mix of theory, engineering, rules of thumb, insight, creativity etc., all presented lucidly. highly recommended!

he said he hoped students today looked at biology the way he looked at computer science back in the 50s and 60s

that's interesting, i believe ken thompson said something similar re: getting into biology in an interview about 20 years ago.