Viewing profile — alxv

The 35mm format is rather amazing balance of design trade-offs. No wonder it is so enduring. It's large enough for the double-Gauss lens (a.k.a. normal prime lens) to have a nice s…

You only need 2 processors, since each cores gives you 2 vCPUs. "For the n1 series of machine types, a virtual CPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread" -- https://clou…

You are missing a crucial piece here to have consistent hashing: you also need hash the names of the servers. With consistent hashing you hash both the names of the requests and of…

There is a proof shown in this handout: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sinclair/cs271/n15.pdf It's hard to understand why this technique works so well without digging deep in th…

The method is called "Power of Two Random Choices " ( http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/handbook20... ). And the two-choices paradigm is widely applicable beyond lo…

What happens when the number of servers changes? The cache hit rate would likely drop to zero until it warms up again, which is a good way to accidentally overload your systems. Lo…

If your employer 401k plan allows it, you can roll over after-tax 401k contributions to a Roth IRA (a.k.a. mega-backdoor Roth IRA).

Sorry, it turns that was misunderstanding from my part. It turns out we cannot solve a board row by row without revisiting the previous rows. The board below is a counterexample: 1…

For every boards are two chessboard patterns we can solve for. For example, for a 3x3 board we can have: 101 010 010 or 101 101 010 where 1 is a white square and 0 is a black squar…

Like Lights Out, this game can be solved using Gaussian elimination over Z/2 (integers modulo 2). This means the order of the tiles you press do not matter, and that you can solve …

During the winter, most fresh vegetables in Canada are imported from Mexico and the US. These are mostly breed for shelf life and usually bland. In the summer, local fruit and vege…

On the other hand, the bland stuff doesn't poison you as much with lead. http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/lead-in-vine...

In the U.S., Californian olive oils are your best bet. Otherwise, Costco Kirkland Signature olive oil (which is now Greek oil [1]) is another good choice. Outside of Italy, it's di…

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330280

"Don't be evil" is still included in Google's code of conduct. https://investor.google.com/corporate/google-code-of-conduct...

There is a very succinct implementation of Algorithm X in Python that uses a variation of the Dancing Links approach. http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~aassaf9/python/algorithm_x.html http:…

Google runs a company-wide disaster recovery testing event every year. Earthquakes are among the numerous scenarios simulated. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2371516

That's with resources cached. HTTP Status 304 means the resource was not modified, and thus can be retrieved from the local cache.

A/A tests (also known as Null tests) are useful to validate that users are assigned to the control and experiment groups without bias. Offline resampling methods, like bootstrappin…

You can read the article if you come from a Google search. http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.medscape.com%2F...

By that logic, why consumers should pay anything to ISPs? ISPs don't have obligations to sign free peering agreements to CDNs or other large network owners, like Netflix, if it isn…