Skip to content

Archives

Links for 2014-10-08

  • Trouble at the Koolaid Point — Serious Pony

    This is a harrowing post from Kathy Sierra, full of valid observations:

    You’re probably more likely to win the lottery than to get any law enforcement agency in the United States to take action when you are harassed online, no matter how visciously and explicitly. Local agencies lack the resources, federal agencies won’t bother.
    That to the power of ten in Ireland, too, I’d suspect. Fuck this. Troll culture is way out of control….

    (tags: twitter harassment feminism weev abuse trolls 4chan kathy-sierra)

  • Tehuti

    An embryonic metrics library for Java/Scala from Felix GV at LinkedIn, extracted from Kafka’s metric implementation and in the new Voldemort release. It fixes the major known problems with the Meter/Timer implementations in Coda-Hale/Dropwizard/Yammer Metrics. ‘Regarding Tehuti: it has been extracted from Kafka’s metric implementation. The code was originally written by Jay Kreps, and then maintained improved by some Kafka and Voldemort devs, so it definitely is not the work of just one person. It is in my repo at the moment but I’d like to put it in a more generally available (git and maven) repo in the future. I just haven’t had the time yet… As for comparing with CodaHale/Yammer, there were a few concerns with it, but the main one was that we didn’t like the exponentially decaying histogram implementation. While that implementation is very appealing in terms of (low) memory usage, it has several misleading characteristics (a lack of incoming data points makes old measurements linger longer than they should, and there’s also a fairly high possiblity of losing interesting outlier data points). This makes the exp decaying implementation robust in high throughput fairly constant workloads, but unreliable in sparse or spiky workloads. The Tehuti implementation provides semantics that we find easier to reason with and with a small code footprint (which we consider a plus in terms of maintainability). Of course, it is still a fairly young project, so it could be improved further.’ More background at the kafka-dev thread: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/kafka-dev/201402.mbox/%3C131A7649-ED57-45CB-B4D6-F34063267664@linkedin.com%3E

    (tags: kafka metrics dropwizard java scala jvm timers ewma statistics measurement latency sampling tehuti voldemort linkedin jay-kreps)

  • “Quantiles on Streams” [paper, 2009]

    ‘Chiranjeeb Buragohain and Subhash Suri: “Quantiles on Streams” in Encyclopedia of Database Systems, Springer, pp 2235–2240, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-387-35544-3’, cited by Martin Kleppman in http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/kafka-dev/201402.mbox/%3C131A7649-ED57-45CB-B4D6-F34063267664@linkedin.com%3E as a good, short literature survey re estimating percentiles with a small memory footprint.

    (tags: latency percentiles coding quantiles streams papers algorithms)

  • Belkin Router Apocalypse

    Many Belkin routers attempt to determine if they’re connected to the internet by pinging ‘heartbeat.belkin.com’, in a classic amateur fail move. Good reason not to run Belkin firmware if that’s the level of code quality to expect

    (tags: belkin fail ping icmp funny internet dailywtf broken)

  • Seven deadly sins of talking about “types”

    Good essay

    (tags: programming types rants coding languages fp)

  • Shellshock

    An _extremely_ detailed resource about the bash bug

    (tags: bash hacking security shell exploits reference shellshock)