a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
Visit blog.acolyer.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2016 – Nov 2022
Systems & Performance 22Software Engineering 19Databases & Data 12Security & Privacy 11AI & Machine Learning 10Math & Algorithms 8
Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud Kleppmann et al., Onward! ’19 Watch out! If you start reading this paper you could be lost for hours following all the interesti…
How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild Yang et al., ICSE’18 This is a fascinating study of the problems people get into when using…
A generalised solution to distributed consensus Howard & Mortier, arXiv’19 This is a draft paper that Heidi Howard recently shared with the world via Twitter, and here’s the accompanying …
150 successful machine learning models: 6 lessons learned at Booking.com Bernadi et al., KDD’19 Here’s a paper that will reward careful study for many organisations. We’ve previously looked a…
The paradigms of programming Floyd, CACM 1979 (Also available in ) A couple of weeks ago we looked at Dan Bernstein’s very topical “thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0.” From the gene…
One model to learn them all Kaiser et al., arXiv 2017 You almost certainly have an abstract conception of a banana in your head. Suppose you ask me if I’d like anything to eat. I can say the word ‘…
File systems unfit as distributed storage backends: lessons from 10 years of Ceph evolution Aghayev et al., SOSP’19 Ten years of hard-won lessons packed into just 17 pages (13 if you don’t co…
Millions of tiny databases, Brooker et al., NSDI’20 This paper is a real joy to read. It takes you through the thinking processes and engineering practices behind the design of a key part of …
Writing parsers like it is 2017 Chifflier & Couprie, SPW’17 With thanks to Glyn Normington for pointing this paper out to me. Earlier this year we looked at ‘System programming in R…
Let’s encrypt: an automated certificate authority to encrypt the entire web, Aas et al., CCS’19 This paper tells the story of Let’s Encrypt, from it’s early beginnings in 20…
My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container Manco et al., SOSP’17 Can we have the improved isolation of VMs, with the efficiency of containers? In today’s paper choice the authors investigate …
Keeping CALM: when distributed consistency is easy Hellerstein & Alvaro, arXiv 2019 The CALM conjecture (and later theorem) was first introduced to the world in a 2010 keynote talk at PODS. Beh…
Amazon Aurora: on avoiding distributed consensus for I/Os, commits, and membership changes, Verbitski et al., SIGMOD’18 This is a follow-up to the paper we looked at earlier this week on the design…
Just say NO to Paxos overhead: replacing consensus with network ordering Li et al., OSDI 2016 Everyone knows that consensus systems such as Paxos, Viewstamped Replication, and Raft impose high over…
TLA+ model checking made symbolic Konnov et al., OOPSLA’19 TLA+ is a formal specification language (Temporal Logic of Actions) particularly well suited to reasoning about distributed algorith…
System programming in Rust: beyond safety Balasubramanian et al., HotOS’17 Balasubramanian et al. want us to switch all of our systems programming over to Rust. This paper sets out the case. …
Deep code search Gu et al., ICSE’18 The problem with searching for code is that the query, e.g. “read an object from xml,” doesn’t look very much like the source code snippets tha…
Last week I jokingly said that POPL papers must pass an ‘intellectual intimidation’ threshold in order to be accepted. That’s not true of course, but it is the case that programming languages paper…
The Linux Scheduler: a Decade of Wasted Cores – Lozi et al. 2016 This is the first in a series of papers from EuroSys 2016. There are three strands here: first of all, there’s some grea…
Towards an API for the real numbers, Boehm, PLDI’20 Last time out we saw that even in scientific computing applications built by experts, problems with floating point numbers are commonplace. …
Understanding deep learning requires re-thinking generalization Zhang et al., ICLR’17 This paper has a wonderful combination of properties: the results are easy to understand, somewhat surpri…
Time protection: the missing OS abstraction Ge et al., EuroSys’19 Ever since the prominent emergence of timing-based microarchitectural attacks (e.g. Spectre, Meltdown, and friends) I’ve been…
Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly Haas et al., PLDI 2017 This is a joint paper from authors at Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple describing the motivations for WebAssembly together w…
Ginseng: keeping secrets in registers when you distrust the operating system Yun & Zhong et al., NDSS’19 Suppose you did go to the extreme length of establishing an unconditional root of …
Watching you watch: the tracking ecosystem of over-the-top TV streaming devices, Moghaddam et al., CCS’19 The results from this paper are all too predictable: channels on Over-The-Top (OTT) s…
Darwin: a genomics co-processor provides up to 15,000x acceleration on long read assembly Turakhia et al., ASPLOS’18 With the slow demise of Moore’s law, hardware accelerators are needed to m…
Achieving 100 Gbps intrusion prevention on a single server, Zhao et al., OSDI’20 Papers-we-love is hosting a mini-event this Wednesday (18th) where I’ll be leading a panel discussion including one …
Mosaic: Processing a trillion-edge graph on a single machine Maass et al., EuroSys’17 Unless your graph is bigger than Facebook’s, you can process it on a single machine. With the incep…
Debugging with intelligence via probabilistic inference Xu et al., ICSE’18 Xu et al. have built a automated debugger that can take a single failing test execution, and with minimal interactio…
Generalized data structure synthesis Loncaric et al., ICSE’18 Many systems have a few key data structures at their heart. Finding correct and efficient implementations for these data structur…