I’ve been reading about BitMessage, an anonymous, encrypted peer-to-peer email protocol. Unfortunately, there are some major problems:
The main difference between the two formats is that in ZIP, compression is built-in and happens independently for every file in the archive, but for tar, compression is an extra step that compresses the entire archive. This means ZIP has better random access while tar+compression will generally provide better compression.
A few jobs ago, I worked at company that collected data from disparate sources, then processed and deduplicated it into spreadsheets for ingestion by the data science and customer support teams. Some common questions the engineering team got were:
To debug these problems, the process was to try to reverse engineer where the data came from, then try to guess which path that data took through the monolithic data processor.
This is the story of how we stopped doing that, and started storing references to all source data for every piece of output data.
When writing code to interact with a third party like a SaaS provider, you typically need to write both code to handle the API the third party uses, and translate their data model into your data model. One thing I’ve found that makes this easier is to do each step separately: First write a library to interact with their API using their own data model, then separately write code to translate between your data model and theirs.
A friend of mine recently convinced me to take a class on quantum computing. The class just started, but I’m already learning interesting things.
For example, one student linked to a lecture on quantum physics which explains it as a generalization of probability theory which allows for complex …