Viewing profile — dougws

This is a pretty good blog post (based on a really good paper) that describes the fundamental differences between interpreters and compilers: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/05/three-p…

You've just invented the field of program synthesis, which is a super active research area right now in programming languages! Here's the paper list from a class at UW focused on t…

Speaking from academic computer science, I have never heard of anyone making the decision not to work on something for this reason--perhaps because if an idea could immediately be …

You absolutely shouldn't feel "mentally inferior" to folks with PhDs. Doing academic research, which probably involves getting a PhD, is almost certainly the best way to make a sig…

One could imagine doing some kind of differential testing of another key-value store against vard to ensure that for a random but large number of requests, they return the same val…

At this point, the standard intro text is Software Foundations [1]. I highly recommend it; it will teach you Coq and also probably make you a better programmer. After SF, Certified…

Thanks! Let us know if you have any questions about the proof itself--unfortunately, it's not particularly well-documented, and Coq isn't super easy to read in the first place.

We are reading! This is a great question. We currently don't prove anything about liveness. We'd love to work on this. As you probably know, Raft and other consensus algorithms are…

Hey, I'm Doug Woos--thanks for this excellent summary! It's worth noting that the Raft proof was completed by a team of people, including me, my research partner James Wilcox ( htt…

Investigating theft takes up police time, which expends taxpayer resources. The market wouldn't take this into account. Also, "doesn't California have bigger issues to worry about"…

Your objections to MongoDB's model seem reasonable, but I don't see any evidence in either this comment or the linked blog post that DocumentDB is better (especially in the absence…

Seems like this is pretty comparable to Vagrant using the Docker backend. Anyone have thoughts on pros and cons of each?

Did you read the whole article? If not, go ahead and read the part about pressuring the intern into giving his assistant oral sex while he (Kennedy) watched. That is absolutely not…

Last I checked, GIT_DIR wasn't actually respected by a lot of git subcommands. Is that no longer the case?

Maybe give some usage examples in the README? This sounds interesting but I'm still pretty confused about what exactly the program does.

Have used all of the techniques in the article (plus dict/set comprehensions) but had never heard of dict views [1] until now. Good stuff! [1] http://docs.python.org/2/library/stdt…

I don't see the programming language set. Is it one of the ones that shows up on the front page?

Github's project pages present a really nice, standardized, easy way to find out what a library does. I am always relieved when I find out that a 3rd-party python library I want to…

Seems like it's likely to be very difficult for a browser to detect whether or not a given request is idempotent, no? You could use HTTP verbs (i.e. assume that GETs are and POSTs …

I've got two conflicting viewpoints on this article. On the one hand, I got my current job (as one of the first 10 employees at a startup) by "traditional" means--I saw a job ad, r…

Absolutely right. There are plenty of ways of making the same point without invoking a very serious condition that makes a lot of peoples' lives extremely difficult.

This is absolutely true. Market validation goes both ways! Don't assume a product is either viable or unviable without confirmation from the intended consumers.