Vikram Dutt vdt

Why I Like Go

I visited with PagerDuty yesterday for a little Friday beer and pizza. While there I got started talking about Go. I was asked by Alex, their CEO, why I liked it. Several other people have asked me the same question recently, so I figured it was worth posting.

Goroutines

The first 1/2 of Go's concurrency story. Lightweight, concurrent function execution. You can spawn tons of these if needed and the Go runtime multiplexes them onto the configured number of CPUs/Threads as needed. They start with a super small stack that can grow (and shrink) via dynamic allocation (and freeing). They are as simple as go f(x), where f() is a function.

Channels

Mathematics: What do grad students in math do all day?

by Yasha Berchenko-Kogan

A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what's going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it's not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article.

The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don't really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.

What can you say?

In August 2007 a hacker found a way to expose the PHP source code on facebook.com. He retrieved two files and then emailed them to me, and I wrote about the issue:

http://techcrunch.com/2007/08/11/facebook-source-code-leaked/

It became a big deal:

http://www.techmeme.com/070812/p1#a070812p1

The two files are index.php (the homepage) and search.php (the search page)

Peter Thiel's CS183: Startup - Class 1 Notes Essay

Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 1 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely.

CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—The Challenge of the Future

Purpose and Preamble

	L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
	Branch mispredict 5 ns
	L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache
	Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
	Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
	Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns
	Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 0.01 ms
	Read 4K randomly from SSD 150,000 ns 0.15 ms
	Read 1 MB sequentially from memory 250,000 ns 0.25 ms
	Round trip within same datacenter 500,000 ns 0.5 ms

	#!/usr/bin/env python

	"""
	smem_test.py - test smem's USS/PSS/RSS values

	More info on smem: http://www.selenic.com/smem/

	Sample run:

	# ./smem_test.py

	#!/usr/bin/perl



	use Mysql;
	use strict;
	use vars qw($school_name);
	use vars qw($pass);

	require "./cgi-lib.pl";

	---------- Forwarded message ----------
	From: Mark S. Miller <[email protected]>
	Date: Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 3:44 PM
	Subject: "Future of Javascript" doc from our internal "JavaScript Summit"
	last week
	To: [email protected]

	On November 10th and 11th, a number of Google teams representing a variety
	of viewpoints on client-side languages met to agree on a common vision for
	the future of Javascript.

	#!/usr/bin/env python

	"""
	This Python code is based on Java code by Lee Jacobson found in an article
	entitled "Applying a genetic algorithm to the travelling salesman problem"
	that can be found at: http://goo.gl/cJEY1
	"""

	import math
	import random

	import urllib2
	import re
	import sys
	from collections import defaultdict
	from random import random

	"""
	PLEASE DO NOT RUN THIS QUOTED CODE FOR THE SAKE OF daemonology's SERVER, IT IS
	NOT MY SERVER AND I FEEL BAD FOR ABUSING IT. JUST GET THE RESULTS OF THE
	CRAWL HERE: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=nqpsnTtW AND SAVE THEM TO "archive.txt"