-
Moral Hazard
The U.S. government is trying to free up credit, by reducing interest rates and other steps. This is probably good for the economy. It also has the effect of reducing the risks faced by banks which made some very bad investment decisions in purchasing unsecured debt. This is a moral hazard: when things go well,…
-
Lukyanenko Watch
I recently read the trilogy of books by Sergei Lukyanenko: Night Watch, Day Watch, Twilight Watch. I’m surprised they aren’t better known–my local science fiction bookstore doesn’t carry them at all. On the surface they seem rather derivative: they involve a struggle between the forces of light (the Night Watch) and the force of darkness…
-
Multi-threading Memory
As I’ve written before, multi-threaded code is hard to write. It becomes even harder to write when you find that lock contention is an efficiency issue. On a modern multi-core system locks require some sort of memory cache coordination between the various cores. If your program is written using fine-grained locks which may be held…
-
Eat Food
I recently read “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan. It’s not as weirdly fascinating as his earlier book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” but it has a lot of interesting information. What I found most interesting was the shift in the recommendations of the McGovern commision on nutrition in 1977. This was the first attempt to…
-
Debugging
I think that people who take a computer science degree in college should be required to study debugging. For better or for worse, debugging is an essential part of programming. However, most programmers are left to learn it on their own, in a way that is not true of many other aspects of programming. I…