Polymath Engineer Weekly #32
Back with more awesome links
Links of the week
"One Size Fits All": An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone
“We believe that the DBMS market is entering a period of very interesting times. There are a variety of existing and newly-emerging applications that can benefit from data management and processing principles and techniques. At the same time, these applications are very much different from business data processing principles and from each other -- there seems to be no obvious way to support them with a single code line. The "one size fits all" theme is unlikely to successfully continue under these circumstances.“
Finding Goroutine bugs with TLA+
“The bug is that the goroutines only receive from limitCh to release their token after sending their result to the unbuffered found channel, while the main code only starts receiving from found after running through the entire loop, and the main code takes the token in the loop and blocks if no tokens are available.”
“why are splines? well my god I have good news for you, here's why splines!”
The Infinitely Profitable Program
“User feedback [on both Tatung’s TPC-2000 and Einstein lines] repeatedly mentioned an irritation: that users often found they had to exit their current application [VisiCalc, WordStar, …] to perform simple disk operations, like finding a file on a floppy. It was a real and frustrating problem. For example, say they were running the popular WordStar word-processor and wanted to find an existing file for editing. Let’s also say they’re not sure which of a dozen floppy disks the file is on – they needed to use CP/M’s DIR command to locate it. But, in order to use DIR they’d first have to exit WordStar. Of course, once they’d found their document they’d have to re-run WordStar, i.e., they had to load WordStar off a floppy again – a real pain, esp. as we’re talking very slow floppy speeds here [for those that remember the sound – chunk chunk chunk is fairly onomatopoeic I think]!
To solve this problem I came up with the idea of GO.COM. The most profitable program ever written?“
“Mocking libraries and mock generators typically include features that encourage a kind of coupling that makes it difficult to change code without breaking tests. Are you counting the number of calls made to your mock? What happens if you add memoisation? You've probably caused failures across the entire suite. The most likely "fix" is to change the call count assertions to whatever the new values are and move on.“
The Creator Economy Was Way Overblown
“Most businesses building tools for creators will go under this year, Rief predicted, noting that the industry is smaller than many hoped for and that 99% of the value still goes to the top .1% of creators. Many within the industry have long held similar views but kept them to themselves as VC dollars poured in. Now, amid a downturn, it’s apparent that the status quo won’t hold.“
Book of the Week
Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms
Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.
Have a nice week. 😉
Have you read last week's post? Check the archive.