Weekly Digest #40

Articles

Free Software and Freakonomics

The current state of software is such that everything depends on everything else. If one essential component ceases to be maintained, or is sold to another (more malicious) actor, the software which depends on it will break.

It is clear that FOSS (free open source software) has a massive social benefit, but the private benefit to the developer is very low. Therefore, incentives matter. In order for the developers to continue their projects, they must have an incentive to do so.

How we scaled the size of Pinterest’s ad corpus by 60x

Memory Bottleneck -> Deprecate In-Memory Index

• move the in-memory index to an external data store. This removed the need for shards entirely

Garbage Collection CPU Pressure -> Heap Optimizations

• cleaning up unused data fields
• reducing the number of long-living objects in favor of creating objects on demand
• pooling objects to reduce large allocation bursts.

Scale & Latency

• Parallelization and Caching

Data Delay

• Real-Time Data Updates

Tutorials

New in Git: switch and restore

switch branch

git checkout develop
git switch develop

create

git checkout -b develop
git switch -c develop

make HEAD point to specific commit

git checkout f8c540805b7e16753c65619ca3d7514178353f39
git switch -d f8c540805b7e16753c65619ca3d7514178353f39

discard change on file

git checkout -- test.txt
git restore -- test.txt

git command

git checkout <tree-ish> -- <pathspec>

Tools

Candide

Identify plants from photo

MacType

Rendering Mac font for Windows.

Off-topic

Framework laptop DIY edition

a modular laptop

Naval Architecture

talks about the design of the ship around how it floats on the ocean and don’t tip over.

The misalignment between the force of buoyancy and the force of gravity of the object will create torque causing the object to rotate until it finds its equilibrium.