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Optimizing hash tables: hiding the hash code
Several JavaScript data structures such as Map, Set, WeakSet, and WeakMap use hash tables under the hood. This article explains how V8 v6.3 improves hash table performance.
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Apple’s New Ad Conversion Tracking Will Benefit User Privacy
Apple has released new developer APIs that will allow mobile advertising conversion tracking while protecting individual user privacy. The new APIs are part of the StoreKit framework and include a …
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Chinese Crankshafts (2012)
To read an updated on this story please click on this link: Chinese Crankshafts for Corvairs, update 2/17/13. If the pictures on this story are small, try clicking on the F5 key at the top of you…
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So You Think You Have a Power Law (2007)
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…
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Growing up with AI
By Stefania Druga Graduate Student, Personal Robots Group LEGO Papert Fellow 2018
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Learning to Predict Depth on the Pixel 3 Phones
Posted by Rahul Garg, Research Scientist and Neal Wadhwa, Software Engineer Portrait Mode on the Pixel smartphones lets you take professional-looki...
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Blender’s Prehistory – Traces on Commodore Amiga (1987-1991)
The following article is a historical look at the era that spawned first raytracers for home computers, a predecessor to Blender among them. Writing it was possible thanks to the fact, that, for the first time, the program and source code of said predecessor are publicly available.
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GRPC and JSON
So you’ve bought into this whole RPC thing and want to try it out, but aren’t quite sure about Protocol Buffers. Your existing code encodes your own objects, or perhaps you have code that needs a particular encoding. What to do? Fortunately, gRPC is encoding agnostic! You can still get a lot of the benefits of gRPC…
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How to Read 100s of Millions of Records per Second from a Single Disk
This article gives an overview of the implementation and performance of two recent additions to LocustDB, an extremely fast open-source analytics database built in Rust. The first addition is suppo…
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Building a Distributed Log from Scratch: Scaling Message Delivery
In part two of this series we discussed data replication within the context of a distributed log and how it relates to high availability. Next, we’ll look at what it takes to scale the log such that it can handle non-trivial workloads. Data Scalability A key part of scaling any kind of data-intensive system is the…
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Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents
Has any successful piece of software ever deserved its success less than the benighted, unloved exercise in minimalism that was MS-DOS? The program that started its life as a stopgap under the name of “The Quick and Dirty Operating System” at a tiny, long-forgotten hardware maker called Seattle Computer Products…
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Fear of Macros
Practical Racket macros
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Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)
[Another submission from a former postdoc at one of the top ten universities in the U.S. The e-mail came to me as follows: "I read your b...
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How Much Does a Compiler Cost?
The compiler tool chain is one of the largest and most complex components of any system, and increasingly will be based on open source code, either GCC or LLVM. On a Linux system only the operating system kernel and browser will have more lines of code. For a commercial system, the compiler has to be completely…
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A Sound Card Before Its Time
A mysterious full-length sound card recently arrived at the OS/2 Museum. It was clearly manufactured by IBM in 1985, and sports a 20 MHz Texas Instrument TMS32010 DSP (the DSP is the large black DIP chip near the lower left corner, not the ceramic gold cap chip).
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The printer that wouldn't print: Fixing an IBM 1401 mainframe from the 1960s
The Computer History Museum has two operational IBM 1401 computers used for demos , but a few weeks ago one computer suddenly couldn't prin...
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Mobile Devices Compromised by Fake Secure Messaging Clients
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and mobile security company Lookout have uncovered a new malware espionage campaign infecting thousands of people in more than 20 countries. Hundreds of gigabytes of data has been stolen, primarily through mobile devices compromised by fake...
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Why does the Zune HD have the message “For our Princess” inside of the case?
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Imaginary worlds dreamed by BigGAN
These are some of the most amazing generated images I’ve ever seen. Introducing BigGAN, a neural network that generates high-resolution, sometimes photorealistic, imitations of photos it’s seen. None of the images below are real - they’re all generated by BigGAN.
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Project Capillary: End-to-end encryption for push messaging, simplified
Developers already use HTTPS to communicate with Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). The channel between FCM server endpoint and the device is encrypted with SSL over TCP. However, messages are not encrypted end-to-end (E2E) between the developer server and the user device unless developers take special measures. To this…