A Survival Guide to a PhD
This guide is patterned after my “Doing well in your courses”, a post I wrote a long time ago on some of the tips/tricks I’ve developed...
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Notes on concurrency bugs
Do concurrency bugs matter? From the literature, we know that most reported bugs in distributed systems have really simple causes and can be caught by trivial...
Read moreDeep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels
<!– –> This is a long overdue blog post on Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL is hot! You may have noticed that computers can now automatically learn...
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Some programming blogs to consider reading
This is one of those “N technical things every programmer must read” lists, except that “programmer” is way too broad a term and the styles of...
Read moreGoogle SRE book
The book starts with a story about a time Margaret Hamilton brought her young daughter with her to NASA, back in the days of the Apollo...
Read moreWe only hire the trendiest
An acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Mike, is looking for work after getting laid off from a contract role at Microsoft, which has happened to...
Read moreHarry Potter and the Methods of Rationality review by su3su2u1
These are archived from the now defunct su3su2u1 tumblr. Since there was some controversy over su3su2u1’s identity, I’ll note that I am not su3su2u1 and that...
Read moresu3su2u1 physics tumblr archive
These are archived from the now defunct su3su2u1 tumblr. A Roundabout Approach to Quantum Mechanics This will be the first post in what I hope will...
Read moreSampling v. tracing
Perf is probably the most widely used general purpose performance debugging tool on Linux. There are multiple contenders for the #2 spot, and, like perf, they’re...
Read moreWe saw some really bad Intel CPU bugs in 2015 and we should expect to see more in the future
2015 was a pretty good year for Intel. Their quarterly earnings reports exceeded expectations every quarter. They continue to be the only game in town for...
Read moreNormalization of deviance
Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe...
Read moreBig companies v. startups
There’s a meme that’s been going around for a while now: you should join a startup because the money is better and the work is more...
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