* Messy by Tim Harford: how pursuing tidy systems is harming us and why we should embrace messy systems that better reflect the unpredictableness of the real world. The systems in question can be anything from how you organize your inbox to how cities are laid out. Although it struck me…
Alone on the Wall by Alex Honnold and David Roberts This is a memoir of sorts by a rock climber most famous for his free solo ascents(free soloing = rock climbing without a rope). The reason I picked up this book is because I’ve been doing some climbing myself…
I have lately been studying how databases work under the hood. There are many problems that a database has to solve. At the moment, I’ve been having fun exploring how data is stored on disk. Previously, I wrote about how a hashtable is stored on disk. This post is…
In the last post, I introduced the idea of linear hashing. This post will describe a Rust implementation of the algorithm. I won’t go through every last line of code, but hopefully enough to give you a good understanding of how the whole thing works. I should also mention…
In this series of posts, I want to walk you through how to build a simple, persistent key-value store. We will be using an on-disk hashtable(also called external hashtable) to store the key-value mappings. In this post, I will explain hashtables briefly and an algorithm called linear hashing. In…
* Computers can be understoodExplains a mindset to understand systems by looking under the layers of abstraction. * Systems that defy detailed understanding: Follow-up to the above, listing some types of systems where it’s either impossible or just not worth it to understand from first-principles how the system works. Advocates using…
Grr. I really need to write blog posts other than book reviews. But until then, here are some notes on two books I read recently: Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner Superforecasting is a book about what qualities it takes for a person to be good at forecasting events.…
Spin is a sci-fi trilogy comprising of the books Spin, Axis and Vortex. The first book in the series, Spin is a really great science-fiction story and the Hugo award it won is well-deserved. Since it is a story that can be easily spoiled, I’ll try to sell it…