HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mad

756 karma · joined June 19, 2008

submissionscomments
mad··on An opinionated take on how to do important research that matters
> Most of this list is about how to dress for senpai; figuratively speaking. A pretty depressing take on "how to do important research that matters".

How is that the case? The tips seem to aim for impactful research: picking good ideas and executing well on them. There's a tacit assumption that such impactful research will win best paper awards, but that's actually not substantiated and isn't obviously correct, since best paper selection committees can't see the future. For example, many (maybe most?) winners of retrospective awards (test-of-time / influential paper) aren't papers that won a best paper award when originally published.

Most of the author's papers he cites in the post, including the membership inference paper which is one of the papers the author is "most proud of," didn't win best paper awards.

mad··on Optimistic Locking in B-Trees
You should also check out the Maple Tree (https://docs.kernel.org/core-api/maple_tree.html).

It's the data structure used to track non-overlapping intervals in the Linux kernel's virtual memory subsystem.

If you don't mind sharing, what's your use case for such a data structure?

mad··on Downfall Attacks
Company politics? According to this tweet, parts of Intel did know about this attack: https://twitter.com/bsdaemon/status/1688978152201015301
mad··on Ask HN: What is new in algorithms and data structures these days?
The Cuckoo Trie, an ordered index data structure explicitly designed to have memory-level parallelism, which out-of-order processors can exploit to execute DRAM accesses in parallel:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.09331.pdf

mad··on Scrap your MapReduce – Introduction to Apache Spark
Is this comparison work available?
mad··on Linus Torvalds on C++
I submitted an interesting response to this rant a while back.

It makes some good points, despite the inflammatory technique of characterizing Linus' rant as being caused by a "C-hacker syndrome".

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3416863

mad··on PyPy - We need Software Transactional Memory
You are assuming that all the objects that will be accessed are known up front, before any one of them is accessed. Is that what happens in Python?
mad··on Rob Pike discovers sendfile(2)
What happens if you need to retransmit a packet?
mad··on It’s Faster Because It’s C
Do you think that is true even for modern allocators like Hoard?

In other words, I'm curious what are the underlying malloc() implementations that pool allocation so outperforms.

mad··on Ask HN: do I want to work at a trading firm?
It seems reasonable that the people optimizing code and writing the most efficient infrastructure are not the same folks who actually write trading algorithms. Now, supposedly a big part of trading firm's success is that its algorithms are faster than the competition's. So are the low-level infrastructure people paid as well as the algorithm folks?
mad··on You're Doing It Wrong: CS in the real world
It's the van Emde Boas layout. For example, see here http://blogs.msdn.com/b/devdev/archive/2007/06/12/cache-obli....
mad··on Ask HN: I use and love Python. What's the best book to learn C ?
In what sort of workload was a custom allocator the biggest performance win?
mad··on Sotirov and Applebaum's (redacted) Internet vulnerability, published tomorrow at CCC
Some more hints: http://events.ccc.de/2008/12/30/the-cat-is-out-of-the-bag/
mad··on Four Reasons Why Parallel Programs Should Have Serial Semantics
Here you go: http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=show...

The issue is that STMs have a lot of book-keeping overhead in addition to the locking.

mad··on Stop Sharing Your Twitter Credentials
Wasn't this a targeted attack against a security blogger?