Metadata

This is a very recent book, released on May 28, 2019. I got drawn to this book due to its interesting and controversial title: "Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World". The blurb about the book says: "If you take a closer look at the world's top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, you'll find that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. [David Epstein] discovered that in most fields--especially those that are complex and unpredictable--generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They're also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can't spy from deep in their hyperfocused trenches. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and per...

The specification for consensus is as follows. The first two are safety properties, the last one a liveness property. Agreement : No two node can commit different decisions. Validity (Non-triviality) : If all initial values are same, nodes must commit that value. Termination : Nodes commit eventually. Below I talk about whether ABD or chain replication solve consensus, and whether it would be possible to implement state machine replication using them. Does ABD solve consensus? No, ABD does not solve consensus. I had written a summary of the ABD protocol in a 2012 post.  And I had talked about why ABD is not consensus in a 2015 post. Below is a short recap of that followed by a discussion of whether ABD can still be employed to solve the state machine replication problem. Consensus is prone to the FLP impossibility result, and it may lose progress under FLP conditions. In particular, for Paxos, if we can't determine whether the incumbent leader has failed in an asynch...

This book, by Safi Bahcall , is about how to nurture radical breakthroughs in science and technology. The book draws inspiration from the innovations Vannevar Bush made possible Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), created in 1941, and the innovations Theodore N. Vail enabled at Bell. OSRD's portfolio of accomplishments is impressive indeed. The war against Nazis is won through superiority in the field of science . The bombers' microwave radar cut through darkness and fog to detect German U-Boats, and rendered them ineffective in a matter of weeks. The book compiles insights from the organizational principles Bush and Vail employed as Bush-Vail rules. The main concept here is of a dynamic equilibrium, where the organization maintains well-separated and equally strong loonshot and franchise groups (phase separation) continuously exchanging projects and ideas in both directions. Summary of the The Bush-Vail rules 1. Separate the phases separate you...

This position paper by UC Berkeley RISE lab is about serverless computing, its shortcomings, and its potential. It is easy reading, and is still useful even if you have a pretty good understanding about serverless computing due to some insights and forecasts in the paper. As you will read below, the paper provides a very strong endorsement for serverless computing. Instead of explaining the paper in my terms, I quote some of my highlights from the paper below, and at the end, in the MAD questions section, I discuss some of my thoughts on serverless computing. Introduction We believe the main reason for the success of low-level virtual machines was that in the early days of cloud computing users wanted to recreate the same computing environment in the cloud that they had on their local computers to simplify porting their workloads to the cloud. To set up your own environment in cloud (using virtual machines), you need to address these 8 issues. Redundancy for availability, ...

Here is the pdf for the paper.  It is by Lisa Glendenning, Ivan Beschastnikh, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Thomas Anderson, Department of Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington. This paper is about peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. But the paper is from 2011, way after the P2P hype had died. This makes the paper more interesting, because it had the opportunity to consider things in hindsight. The P2P corpse was cold, and Dynamo had looted the distributed hash tables (DHT) idea from P2P and applied it in the context of datacenter computing.  In return, this work liberates the Paxos coordination idea from the datacenter world and employs it in the P2P world. It replaces each node (or virtual node) in a P2P overlay ring with a Paxos group that consists of a number of nodes. Ok, what problem do Paxos groups solve in the P2P systems? In the presence of high churn, DHTs in P2P systems suffer from inconsistent routing state and inconsistent name space partitioni...

This book is by Austin Kleon, 2012. I had also wrote about his other book "Show Your Work! 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered."  Here are the 10 things nobody told you about being creative: Steal like an artist. Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started. Write the book you want to read. Use your hands. Side projects and hobbies are important. The secret: do good work and share it with people. Geography is no longer our master. Be nice. (The world is a small town.) Be boring. (It’s the only way to get work done.) Creativity is subtraction. Kleon gave a short TEDX talk about the idea behind this book. The title is an homage to a quote attributed to Picasso: “ Good artists  borrow,  great artists  steal.” Picasso also said: "Art is theft." It’s not  just  where you take things from, it's where you take them to. Here are some parts I highlighted under Section 1: "steal like an artist." Every artist gets asked...

This book is by Ed Catmull, cofounder of Pixar, with Amy Wallace, 2014. The book is about the cultivation and management of creativity: If Pixar is ever successful, will we do something stupid, too? Can paying careful attention to the missteps of others help us be more alert to our own? Or is there something about becoming a leader that makes you blind to the things that threaten the well-being of your enterprise?  I would devote myself to learning how to build not just a successful company but a sustainable creative culture. As I turned my attention from solving technical problems to engaging with the philosophy of sound management, I was excited once again. While reading the book, I was impressed by how many questions Ed kept asking. I thought I was asking a lot of questions , but Ed is really really into asking questions and using them to achieve focus. Here are some parts I highlighted from the book. From childhood to PhD Growing up in the 1950s, I had yearned to be ...