A focus on probabilistic data structures with some Bitcoin thrown in this week.
Probabilistic data structures for web analytics and data mining (2012) - an article I’ve wanted to read for a long time. It covers Bloom Filteres, HyperLogLog counters, Count-Min Sketches and all that nice stuff and it also has a bunch of examples and real-world numbers for applications. There’s a bunch of formulas, but not proofs or intuitions behind why they happen. That’s a tall taks in general, since there’s a lot of non-intuitive material to cover.
Sketching data structures (2010) - just a small introduction to Bloom filters and count min sketches, with some analogies.
Probabilistic data structure showdown: cuckoo filters vs Bloom filters (2016) - a comparison of the two and an introduction to Cuckoo filters. The Bloom filters used are counting ones, which allow for deletion. It’s a bigger data structure than a regular one, but it makes for a fair comparison to Cuckoo filters.
On-call at any size (2017) - presents on-call practices for companies of 10, 11-100, 101-1000, 1001-10000 and 10000+ engineers. It’s really interesting how on-call and the nature of keeping systems up changes from small to huge. On one end of the spectrum there’s a lot of manual shepharding, while at the other there’s basically a statistical understanding of what the system should be doing. And failure, loads and loads of failure.
Updating navifation for StackOverflow, Enterprise, and Stack Exchange Sites (2018) - an overview of recent UI changes to SO and the process behind them. Some details about the upcoming channels feature.
How the Bitcoin protocol actually works (2013) - Even though I knew about Bitcoin since forever I didn’t take the time to properly understand it. Which is a shame, because even cursory glances suggested that it’s seriously cool tech. Apart from all the hype and mania surrounding it. The author is Michael Nielsen, who’s something of a polymath, operating in quantum computing, deep learning, networks theory and apparently distributed systems. The article doesn’t disappoint - it’s a very lucid presentation of what one might want out of a digital currency and how to go about doing that - ending up with Bitcoin at the end.
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