I guess I have finally lost my patience with C semantics. Although the C programming language is kind of infamous for its lack of memory safety and disastrous type system, I still believed that the programming language still represented intuition well, and given that an appropriate amount of attention is paid, all mistakes can be avoided. Well, turns out it is not the case when it comes to undefined behaviors. … »
The Greek island of Paxos has way too many mysteries, for both archaeologists and computer scientists. When I was first reading Dr. Leslie Lamport’s The Part-time Parliament, which was an epic introduction of a novel consensus protocol designed for distributed systems, I genuinely wondered who that group of archaeologists were and how Dr. Lamport managed to discover such perfect analogies between an ancient democracy and distributed computer systems. To be honest I almost planned my visit to the archaeology department myself. … »
I was confronted an ethical dilemma the other day. Although it is just a hypothetical one with the form of a series of academic discussions, I consider it to be serious enough to put up an article documenting it, and expressing some of my thoughts. The question at the center of the concerns is very simple: we, who identify ourselves as engineers, are we really making the difference we think we make? … »