Trade-offs under pressure: heuristics and observations of teams resolving internet service outages, Allspaw, Masters thesis, Lund University, 2015 Following on from the STELLA report, today we̵… | Continue reading
STELLA: report from the SNAFU-catchers workshop on coping with complexity, Woods 2017, Coping with Complexity workshop “Coping with complexity” is about as good a three-word summary of … | Continue reading
Synthesizing data structure transformations from input-output examples, Feser et al., PLDI’15 The Programmatically Interpretable Reinforcement Learning paper that we looked at last time out c… | Continue reading
Challenges of real-world reinforcement learning, Dulac-Arnold et al., ICML’19 Last week we looked at some of the challenges inherent in automation and in building systems where humans and sof… | Continue reading
Ironies of automation, Bainbridge, Automatica, Vol. 19, No. 6, 1983 With thanks to Thomas Depierre for the paper recommendation. Making predictions is a dangerous game, but as we look forward to th… | Continue reading
Welcome to another year of The Morning Paper! Over the holidays I spent some time mapping out a partial conference calendar for the year, and thinking about the kinds of papers I want to be reading… | Continue reading
Scalability! But at what COST? – McSherry et al. 2015 With thanks to Felix Cuadrado, @felixcuadrado, for pointing this paper out to me via twitter. Scalability is highly prized, yet it can be… | Continue reading
My children broke up from school this past weekend, which seems as good a reason as any to call this ‘end of term’ for The Morning Paper. I’ll be taking a break until the New Year… | Continue reading
Transactional Data Structure Libraries Spiegelman et al. PLDI 2016 Today’s choice won a distinguished paper award at the recent PLDI 2016 conference. Spiegelman et al. show how to add transactional… | Continue reading
A tale of two abstractions: the case for object space, Bittman et al., HotStorage 2019. This is a companion paper to the "persistent problem" piece that we looked at earlier this week, go… | Continue reading
A persistent problem: managing pointers in NVM Bittman et al., PLOS’19 At the start of November I was privileged to attend HPTS (the High Performance Transaction Systems) conference in Asilom… | Continue reading
Benchmarking spreadsheet systems Rahman et al., Preprint A recent TwThread drew my attention to this pre-print paper. When spreadsheets were originally conceived, data and formula were input by han… | Continue reading
Declarative assembly of web applications from predefined concepts De Rosso et al., Onward! 2019 I chose this paper to challenge my own thinking. I’m not really a fan of low-code / no-code / just dr… | Continue reading
Efficient lock-free durable sets Zuriel et al., OOPSLA’19 Given non-volatile memory (NVRAM), the naive hope for persistence is that it would be a no-op: what happens in memory, stays in memor… | Continue reading
TLA+ model checking made symbolic Konnov et al., OOPSLA’19 TLA+ is a formal specification language (Temporal Logic of Actions) particularly well suited to reasoning about distributed algorith… | Continue reading
Mergeable replicated data types – part II Kaki et al., OOPLSA ’19 Last time out we saw how Mergeable Replicated Data Types (MRDTs) use a bijection between the natural domain of a data t… | Continue reading
Mergeable replicated data types Kaki et al., OOPSLA’19 This paper was published at OOPSLA, but perhaps it’s amongst the distributed systems community that I expect there to be the greatest in… | Continue reading
PlanAlyzer: assessing threats to the validity of online experiments Tosch et al., OOPSLA’19 It’s easy to make experimental design mistakes that invalidate your online controlled experiments. … | Continue reading
Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud Kleppmann et al., Onward! ’19 Watch out! If you start reading this paper you could be lost for hours following all the interesti… | Continue reading
Formal foundations of serverless computing Jangda et al., OOPSLA’19 Jangda et al. won a distinguished paper award at OOPSLA this year for their work on ‘Formal foundations of serverless compu… | Continue reading
SocialHash: An assignment framework for optimizing distributed systems operations on social networks – Shalita et al., NSDI ’16 Large scale systems frequently need to partition resource… | Continue reading
Scaling symbolic evaluation for automated verification of systems code with Serval Nelson et al., SOSP’19 Serval is a framework for developing automated verifiers of systems software. It make… | Continue reading
Snap: a microkernel approach to host networking Marty et al., SOSP’19 This paper describes the networking stack, Snap, that has been running in production at Google for the last three years+.… | Continue reading
The inflection point hypothesis: a principled debugging approach for locating the root cause of a failure Zhang et al., SOSP’19 It’s been a while since we looked a debugging and troubleshooti… | Continue reading
File systems unfit as distributed storage backends: lessons from 10 years of Ceph evolution Aghayev et al., SOSP’19 Ten years of hard-won lessons packed into just 17 pages (13 if you don’t co… | Continue reading
An analysis of performance evolution of Linux’s core operations Ren et al., SOSP’19 I was drawn in by the headline results here: This paper presents an analysis of how Linux’s performance has… | Continue reading
Learning certifiably optimal rule lists for categorical data Angelino et al., JMLR 2018 Today we’re taking a closer look at CORELS, the Certifiably Optimal RulE ListS algorithm that we encountered … | Continue reading
Stop explaining black box machine learning models for high stakes decisions and use interpretable models instead Rudin et al., arXiv 2019 With thanks to Glyn Normington for pointing out this paper … | Continue reading
Task-based effectiveness of basic visualizations Saket et al., IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 2019 So far this week we’ve seen how to create all sorts of fantastic interac… | Continue reading
Futzing and moseying: interviews with professional data analysts on exploration practices Alspaugh et al., VAST’18 What do people actually do when they do ‘exploratory data analysis’ (EDA)? T… | Continue reading
Vega-lite: a grammar of interactive graphics Satyanarayan et al., IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 2016 From time to time I receive a request for more HCI (human-computer i… | Continue reading
HackPPL: a universal probabilistic programming language Ai et al., MAPL’19 The Hack programming language, as the authors proudly tell us, is “a dominant web development language across … | Continue reading
“I was told to buy a software or lose my computer. I ignored it”: a study of ransomware Simoiu et al., SOUPS 2019 This is a very easy to digest paper shedding light on the prevalence of… | Continue reading
Learning a unified embedding for visual search at Pinterest Zhai et al., KDD’19 Last time out we looked at some great lessons from Airbnb as they introduced deep learning into their search sy… | Continue reading
Applying deep learning to Airbnb search Haldar et al., KDD’19 Last time out we looked at Booking.com’s lessons learned from introducing machine learning to their product stack. Today’s paper … | Continue reading
150 successful machine learning models: 6 lessons learned at Booking.com Bernadi et al., KDD’19 Here’s a paper that will reward careful study for many organisations. We’ve previously looked a… | Continue reading
Detecting and characterizing lateral phishing at scale Ho et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019 This is an investigation into the phenomenon of lateral phishing attacks. A lateral phishing attack … | Continue reading
in-toto: providing farm-to-table guarantees for bits and bytes Torres-Arias et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019 Small world with high risks did a great job of highlighting the absurd risks we’re… | Continue reading
Small world with high risks: a study of security threats in the npm ecosystem Zimmermann et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019 This is a fascinating study of the npm ecosystem, looking at the grap… | Continue reading
Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems Sathaye et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019 It’s been a while since we last looked at security attacks against connected real-world entiti… | Continue reading
50 ways to leak your data: an exploration of apps’ circumvention of the Android permissions system Reardon et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019 The problem is all inside your app, she said to me … | Continue reading
The secret sharer: evaluating and testing unintended memorization in neural networks Carlini et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019 This is a really important paper for anyone working with language… | Continue reading
We’ve been covering papers from VLDB 2019 for the last three weeks, and next week it will be time to mix things up again. There were so many interesting papers at the conference this year though th… | Continue reading
Updating graph databases with Cypher Green et al., VLDB’19 This is the story of a great collaboration between academia, industry, and users of the Cypher graph querying language as created by… | Continue reading
Fine-grained, secure and efficient data provenance on blockchain systems Ruan et al., VLDB’19 We haven’t covered a blockchain paper on The Morning Paper for a while, and today’s choice won th… | Continue reading
Procella: unifying serving and analytical data at YouTube Chattopadhyay et al., VLDB’19 Academic papers aren’t usually set to music, but if they were the chorus of Queen’s “I want it al… | Continue reading
Experiences with approximating queries in Microsoft’s production big-data clusters Kandula et al., VLDB’19 I’ve been excited about the potential for approximate query processing in analytic c… | Continue reading
DDSketch: a fast and fully-mergeable quantile sketch with relative-error guarantees Masson et al., VLDB’19 Datadog handles a ton of metrics – some customers have endpoints generating ov… | Continue reading