System Architecture

It is all about integers

Base58 is a character encoding system developed by Satoshi Nakamoto. It was first released on the earliest Bitcoin source code tree. Satoshi felt that a new encoding was necessary for Bitcoin’s addresses and transactions, since he thought the existing ones, like Base64, would cause confusion when writing down Bitcoin addresses and TX hashes. In essence, […]

A Bayesian network (also known as a Bayes network, Bayes net, belief network, or decision network) is a probabilistic graphical model that represents a set of variables and their conditional dependencies via a directed acyclic graph (DAG).[1] While it is one of several forms of causal notation, causal networks are special cases of Bayesian networks. Bayesian networks are ideal for taking an event that occurred and predicting the likelihood that any one of several possible known causes was the contributing factor. For example, a Bayesian network could represent the probabilistic relationships between diseases and symptoms. Given symptoms, the network can be used to compute the probabilities of the presence of various diseases.

Learn about the Specification Design Pattern in C# and its benefits for your code. See how this pattern can improve code quality and how to implement it!

Although external caches are a great companion for reducing latencies, they often introduce more problems than benefits. Here’s what to do instead.

By considering this advice, IT leaders can move AI initiatives forward despite the obstacles and pressures they’re up against.

This week I found myself digging through the code of c4, an implementation of C “in four functions”, by Robert Swierczek. I remember coming across c4 when it was released ten years ago. It got me excited: hey, C in four functions, that means it’s easy to understand right?

Our setting is logic programming, a field which attempts to design programming languages whose semantics have a close relationship to formal logic. The reason we might want to do this is that it suits our application domain more precisely than an implementation in a traditional programming language. Thus, using a logic programming language allows us to write more obviously-correct code, and perhaps even code that can be extracted cleanly from a certified implementation. Alternatively, if we did it ourselves, we’d have to do what our compiler (interpreter, …) would do anyway, so there’s no sense in doing it manually. Unfortunately, when we see a powerful tool, we are tempted to use it for everything: if our application is not ultimately-suited to the operationalization strategy of the logic programming engine we’re using, we simply obfuscate the issue in a veneer of formalism and end up with leaky abstractions. This is, I speculate, why logic programming languages have never caught on broadly for general-purpose programming. In this blog, I will detail the various trade-offs and implementation paradigms for modern logic programming engines, starting from Datalog and with a focus on program analysis.

Organizations are increasingly turning to this relatively new field combining data science, decision theory and AI to augment and improve decision-making.

On the value of "scavenging" for paradigm adoption

The Dynix Automated Library System was a popular integrated library system, with a heyday from the mid-1980s to the late-1990s. It was used by libraries to replace the paper-based card catalog, and track lending of materials from the library to patrons.

Learn how to build cloud-native authorization systems with CI/CD, thorough testing, and precise modeling and implementation.

IPFS Gateway acts as a bridge between traditional HTTP clients and IPFS. Through the gateway, users can download files, directories and other IPLD data stored in IPFS as if they were stored in a traditional web server.

Learn why gateways are an important part of using IPFS in conjunction with the legacy web.

Learn about compute-over-data with content-addressed data on IPFS

Send push notifications to your phone via PUT/POST

Jackson Annotations with Examples. n this article we will explore few important annotations like JsonProperty, JsonFormat, JsonIgnore, JsonIgnoreProperties, JsonPropertyOrder, JsonRawValue, JsonCreator, JsonRootName, JsonValue, JsonAnyGetter, JsonSetter, JsonGetter.

Metasurface arrays will portably link up base stations, cars, and drones

This may be the most programming knowledge you can’t miss

A deeper dive into the new Haidra project, written by Haidra's lead developer.

We need to talk about this problem. Should Mastodon step up?

Hubble Network recently announced that it has achieved something many believed to be impossible: it established a Bluetooth connection directly to space, making it the first company...

The more you practice creating diagrams, the better you'll become at distilling complex systems into visual representations that everyone can understand.

Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System. An annotated copy of the original paper submitted to USENIX 2019.

Deep-dive into Zanzibar: Google's Global Authorization System. Understand its purpose, the developer's view, and its implementation.

As with any ageing blog, _some_ of my outbound links are hitting either 404s or domains that are no longer active. It's understandable given that my blog is ar…