Caches: LRU v. random
Once upon a time, my computer architecture professor mentioned that using a random eviction policy for caches really isn’t so bad. That random eviction isn’t bad...
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Testing v. informal reasoning
This is an off-the-cuff comment for Hacker School’s Paper of the Week Read Along series for Out of the Tar Pit. I find the idea itself,...
Read moreAssembly v. intrinsics
Every once in a while, I hear how intrinsics have improved enough that it’s safe to use them for high performance code. That would be nice....
Read moreGoogle wage fixing, 11-CV-02509-LHK, ORDER DENYING PLAINTIFFS’ MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY APPROVAL OF SETTLEMENTS WITH ADOBE, APPLE, GOOGLE, AND INTEL
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA SAN JOSE DIVISION IN RE: HIGH-TECH EMPLOYEE ANTITRUST LITIGATION THIS DOCUMENT RELATES TO: ALL ACTIONS Case No.: 11-CV-02509-LHK...
Read moreVerilog Won & VHDL Lost? — You Be The Judge!
This is an archived USENET post from John Cooley on a competitive comparison between VHDL and Verilog that was done in 1997. I knew I hit...
Read moreData-driven bug finding
I can’t remember the last time I went a whole day without running into a software bug. For weeks, I couldn’t invite anyone to Facebook events...
Read moreEditing binaries
Editing binaries is a trick that comes in handy a few times a year. You don’t often need to, but when you do, there’s no alternative....
Read moreThat bogus gender gap article
Last week, Quartz published an article titled “There is no gender gap in tech salaries”. That resulted in linkbait copycat posts all over the internet, from...
Read moreThat time Oracle tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking their database
In 1983, at the University of Wisconsin, Dina Bitton, David DeWitt, and Carolyn Turbyfill created a database benchmarking framework. Some of their results included (lower is...
Read moreWhy don’t schools teach debugging?
In the fall of 2000, I took my first engineering class: ECE 352, an entry-level digital design class for first-year computer engineers. It was standing room...
Read moreDo programmers need math?
Dear David, I’m afraid my off the cuff response the other day wasn’t too well thought out; when you talked about taking calc III and linear...
Read moreData alignment and caches
Here’s the graph of a toy benchmark1 of page-aligned vs. mis-aligned accesses; it shows a ratio of performance between the two at different working set sizes....
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