February 22, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-02-18

The Peseverance rover lands on Mars. In this month, the UAE, PRC, and US all sent scientific instruments to Mars. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/science/nasa-peseverance-mars-landing.html

January 31, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-01-29

TextRank identifies connections between various entities in a text, and implements the concept of recommendation. A text unit recommends other related text units, and the strength of the recommendation is recursively computed based on the importance of the units making the recommendation. In the process of identifying important sentences in a text, a sentence recommends another sentence that addresses similar concepts as being useful for the overall understanding of the text

January 24, 2021

A planted tank

My wife got me a 5 gallon fish tank last Christmas. I’ve wanted to set up a planted tank – an aquarium ecosystem balanced by plants. In a planted tank, the vegetation naturally filter water by using bio waste as fertilizer, and typically contain critters like shrimp and snails to keep algae from taking over. This idea was heavily inspired by Youtube videos from Michael Langerman and Foo the Flowerhorn.

January 22, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-01-22

This blog is such a great example of why it is difficult to creat great software. So often you have to make impossible choices between security and backward-compatibility. Today’s Go security release fixes an issue involving PATH lookups in untrusted directories that can lead to remote execution during the go get command. We expect people to have questions about what exactly this means and whether they might have issues in their own programs.

January 6, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-01-08

Sascha Chua is a great resource on Emacs-y things https://sachachua.com/blog/

January 5, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2020-12-31

Maybe Emacs doesn’t need to be a fusion reactor. I only hope it continues to generate energy for many years to come. It just needs volunteers to keep the fire going. https://www.murilopereira.com/how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/

December 22, 2020

Its Never the Customers Fault

One of the things that happen to engineers is that hard-working, productive engineers are often given leeway to make faux pas because of their contributions. Today, one of the engineers wrote on a public, widely distributed emails the following (paraphrased). We suggested the aforementioned workaround to the customers. But since they cannot do it, we will have to do an emergency release instead. There are two parts here. One, the engineer suggested a workaround that will quickly solve the customers.

December 22, 2020

Posts Of The Week 2020-12-18

Replicating a database can make our applications faster and increase our tolerance to failures, but there are a lot of different options available and each one comes with a price tag. It’s hard to make the right choice if we do not understand how the tools we are using work, and what are the guarantees they provide (or, more importantly, do not provide), and that’s what I want to explore here.

December 13, 2020

Posts Of The Week 2020-12-11

Concept: Poison pill One strategy is a poison pill: a special message on the queue that signals the consumer of that message to end its work. To shut down the squarer, since its input messages are merely integers, we would have to choose a magic poison integer (everyone knows the square of 0 is 0 right? no one will need to ask for the square of 0…) or use null (don’t use null).

November 24, 2020

Posts Of The Week 2020-11-27

Meet GPT-3. It Has Learned to Code (and Blog and Argue). For many artificial intelligence researchers, it is an unexpected step toward machines that can understand the vagaries of human language — and perhaps even tackle other human skills.