Viewing profile — _urga

"How can we be sure that our radar sensor does not trigger an unintentional break due to a plastic bag blowing in the wind? We collect 10000h of real world driving evidence." 10,00…

A few ideas: 1. Add "abstract" to your search query to surface papers. 2. Search for "... reading list". For example, Heidi Howard maintains https://github.com/heidihoward/distribu…

Here are some ways to learn deeply and be relevant: 1. Pick a data structure (such as a hash table or LSM-Tree) then read all the literature there is to read, every single paper th…

Thanks for the pointer to “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”.

I think this comes down to realizing that everything in life is eventually hard. Provided you're doing something worthwhile [1], when the going gets hard, don't look for easier pas…

"just cranking out variations of that formula as papers." You'd be surprised how often variations on a formula are all it takes to destroy security. Security is enumeration at the …

And above all, simplify, even the charts. Make the big idea clear.

As someone who loves C, Zig has replaced C for me and I don't plan to go back. There are just too many benefits, not least developer velocity and readability. Zig is also very appr…

In the general sense, no, not yet, of course, but in one sense, Zig is probably more production ready than Rust, for example on embedded systems with obscure architectures where OO…

No worries, I've made the same mistake and everyone in software security probably makes that mistake at some point.

The malicious actor would simply edit the install script to comment out the checksum verification step, since they already own the script.

Yes, just to add: Raft is essentially Multi-Paxos under the hood, with some overstrict invariants that can impact availability and latency. If you need a consensus algorithm, then …

I would say quality is undervalued when it comes to technology. Technology suffers from a plague of bloat, and it's getting worse as high level languages pile on the dependencies a…

I don't think it's a question of "boring" or "proven" vs "latest" or "newer". It's not even an 80/20 split between "use proven technology" and "explore new tools". What it all come…

Is there any syscall to do the equivalent but from C? e.g. If you were pre-allocating hash tables for a caching service, it would be convenient if the config could stipulate 80% of…

Another example, Zig landed io_uring in the std lib a month ago: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/6356 I'm also really excited by how you can use io_uring to power everything (f…

Beats me!

Cool! I had a similar empirical experience working on a Cauchy Reed-Solomon encoder awhile back, which is essentially measuring xor speed, but I just couldn't get it past 6 GiB/s p…

The page cache is not reliable, and actually does more bad than good, especially in the case of PostgreSQL: https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc20/presentation/rebello

Sure, I'm still pretty fuzzy on these things, but queueing delay is Little's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little's_law It means if a system can only do X of something per sec…

The advertised bandwidth for RAM is not actually what you get per-core, which is what you care about in practice. If you want to know the upper bound on your per-core RAM bandwidth…

"Are sector writes atomic? And if so, for what size sectors?" For a database, this is not the question you want to be asking. It's a rabbit hole. The right answer (which is not alw…