Dated Oct 1, 1974;
last modified on Sat, 27 Mar 2021
Brashly stroked, computer science is what I learned in school, and software engineering is what I encounter in the ‘real world’. The boundary is blurry, so let’s have them all in place.
Towards a Collaborative Web Browser;
Reviews of WWW Proceedings;
Privacy on the Web;
Chrome vs. Everybody;
Facebook to Pay $550 Million to Settle Facial Recognition Suit;
We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in eng hiring. [interviewing.io];
Facebook Monetizing Encrypted Messaging by Analyzing Metadata [Twitter];
An Apology for the Internet - How It Went Wrong [Intelligencer];
A Zooming Web Browser;
Pagination with Relative Cursors Exposing pagination through URLs like example.com/items?page=25&limit=100 leads to SQL like SELECT * from 'items' LIMIT 100 OFFSET 2400;, which inefficiently goes through 2,500 records and discards the first 2,400.
With relative cursors, we have URLs like example.com/items?limit=50&lastID=XXX, which leads to SQL like SELECT * from 'items' WHERE 'id' > XXX ORDER BY 'id' ASC LIMIT 50, and this is more efficient, assuming there are indexes for id....
Signal Is Finally Bringing Its Secure Messaging To the Masses. Andy Greenberg. https://www.wired.com/story/signal-encrypted-messaging-features-mainstream/ . https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/02/14/2216214/signal-is-finally-bringing-its-secure-messaging-to-the-masses#comments . https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22326731 . Feb 14, 2020. Attracting the Masses Brian Acton (WhatsApp cofounder) injected $50m into the Signal Foundation, allowing them to grow from 3 to 50 full-timers.
You’d think that at Signal’s dominance, getting $$$ shouldn’t be a problem. But VCs expect a multiple return and Signal doesn’t look like it will monetize soon....
Mergeable Replicated Data Types On a distributed system, each replica should [eventually] converge to the same state. Commutative Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) can accept updates and achieve consistent without remote synchronization.
The Need for Commutativity Say we have a queue \( 1 \to 2 \). Suppose two replicas, \(r_1\) and \(r_2\), independently call pop(). Each replica will have \(2\) on their queue.
However, on receiving an update that the other replica popped, each replica will call pop() to be consistent, thereby deleting \(2\)....
Identifying Vulnerabilities No matter the obfuscation in the source code, the malicious package will have to make system calls in order to do anything interesting. These system calls are easier to analyze.
Suggestions Know your dependencies by heart. Know the maintainers. Be aware of problems going on in the project and help, e.g. patches, funding sources, etc.
References Hunting for Malicious Packages on PyPI. Jordan Wright....
Garbage Collection Garbage Collection is about simulating a computer with infinite memory. Consequently, if you have more RAM than your program will ever need, then a null garbage collector is a valid one.
Traits of Beautiful Code is the chief designer of Ruby, and thus the frequent illustrations and praises for Ruby.
How do other chief designers explain their rationale? For instance, what would Java’s designer say to ’s criticism?...
Retained Mode vs. Immediate Mode In retained mode, the graphics library exposes an API to the application for building/updating a scene. However, the graphics library is in charge of issuing drawing commands. In contrast, an immediate-mode API allows the application to issue the drawing commands. Retained-mode APIs abstract away initialization, state maintenance and cleanup, but uses more memory. Immediate-mode APIs allow for more targeted optimizations.
https://reactjs.org/ is one of the more popular retained-mode web APIs....
Maybe a good approximation is where Google Research is spending $$$
: Algorithms and Optimization; Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality; Geo; Human Computer Interaction; Health Research; Machine Learning and Data Mining; Mobile; Machine Perception; Networking; Natural Language Processing; Privacy; Quantum Computing; Structured Data, Extraction, Semantic Graph, and Database Management; Security; Software Engineering and Programming Languages; Systems; Misc.
Research Scholar Program recipients. https://research.google/outreach/research-scholar-program/recipients/ . Apr 7, 2021....
Privacy in CS and in the Law;
Web Applications 101;
Information Security [COS 432];
Tracking and Data Collection;
02. Threat Models for Web Security;
Secure Multiparty Computation;
03. Cross-Site Request Forgery (XSRF);
Privacy [COS 432];
Applications for DP;
Building Intuition About DP;
SQL Injection;
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS);
Similarity Measures;
Similarity Measures;
ML Crash Course [dev@google];
Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics [ELE 364];
The Nearest Neighbor Algorithm;
The Nearest Neighbor Algorithm;
Caveats on Similarity Learning;
Caveats on Similarity Learning;
Handling Noisy Data in Nearest Neighbors;
Handling Noisy Data in Nearest Neighbors;
The Case for Range Normalization;
The Case for Range Normalization;
Predicting Continuous Targets Using NN;
Predicting Continuous Targets Using NN;
Other Measures of Similarity in NN;
Other Measures of Similarity in NN;
The Curse of Dimensionality and Feature Selection;
The Curse of Dimensionality and Feature Selection;
ML Usefulness to a Dev;
ML Usefulness to a Dev;
000. Longest Two-Character Substring;
218. To-Do List Pt. I;
380. Smooshed Morse Code;
01. Sum of Powers;
Day 1: The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation;
To-Do List (Intermediate);
Smooshed Morse Code (Intermediate);
Day 2: 1202 Program Alarm;
Fermat's Little Theorem (Intermediate);
Linear Feedback Shift Register (Intermediate);