
The Saddest Moment: Byzantine fault tolerance [pdf] - AndrewDucker
https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thesaddestmoment.pdf
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jordan0day
This is the second article I have read written by this author and I've found
both of them to be mildly informative and wildly entertaining. Sort of like a
Dave Berry of computer science writing.

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Strilanc
There's two more near the bottom of the author (James Mickens)'s Microsoft
Research page[1]. The page itself is also funny.

1: [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mickens/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/)

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brown9-2
A different topic, but [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mickens/theslowwi...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mickens/theslowwinter.pdf) is a good read too.

~~~
ColinCochrane
Another good one, titled "Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of
Deception and Chicanery" is at [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mickens/nestofhor...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mickens/nestofhornets.pdf).

~~~
philsnow
Wow, _somebody_ doesn't like windows phones

but seriously, that article had nothing to do with research. it seemed to be a
rant at third-rate smart phones from 3 years ago.

~~~
repsilat
Fits my experience with my Nexus 7 pretty well.

\- The web-browsing experience is pretty bad (though web developers are as
much to blame for this as the browser devs.) Mobile-optimised sites have text
that's too large and advertising dialogs that forcibly redirect me to places I
don't want to go. Buggy banner ads trying to stick to the bottom of the page
bounce around the page as I scroll, take up too much of the viewport, and
never dismiss when I hit the "X".

\- The touchscreen does play up from time to time, sometimes when I'm using it
and sometimes when I'm not. Two days ago my tablet opened Facebook and tried
to send "monkey with typewriter" messages to old friends...

It doesn't make calls either, but I can forgive it for that... My heirarchy of
needs begins with more "real computer" things, not "real phone" things. To
type a short comment like this I'll first plug in a keyboard (which will cause
all programs to crap themselves....) Anything more involved, though, and I'll
consider spinning up an EC2 instance and doing it over SSH.

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eliwjones
Its a sexy read.

James Mickens is AKA "Galactic Viceroy of Research Excellence"

[http://microsoftjobsblog.com/viceroy-james-
mickens/](http://microsoftjobsblog.com/viceroy-james-mickens/)

~~~
seliopou
The LeBron James of Computer Science

[http://www.livescience.com/40023-james-mickens-microsoft-
s-l...](http://www.livescience.com/40023-james-mickens-microsoft-s-lebron-
james-of-computer-science-waxes-philosophic-video.html)

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hendzen
CS background for people who haven't heard of Byzantine Fault Tolerance:

Original Lamport Paper -
[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82....](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82.pdf)

'Practical' Byzantine Fault Tolerance
-[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82....](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82.pdf)

~~~
somethingnew
You posted a duplicate, what's the other link?

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neilc
Probably
[http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf](http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf)

~~~
hendzen
Yep, that's the one. BTW, didn't know you were on HN, I'm a fan of Bloom.

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army
That was far funnier than it had any right to be.

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mordae
tl;dr Rant about complexity of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance)
and it's practical uselessness.

~~~
ColinWright
Your tl;dr does this paper a serious disservice. It is at once more
enlightening and more entertaining than most other papers.

It's also accurate.

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muyuu
I chuckled. But, like it or not, lesser trust requirements are CRUCIAL in the
immediate future of computing and therefore so is research on Byzantine Fault
Tolerance.

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terminus
Funny, but in light of recent events (see [http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2013/11/uk-spies-continue...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2013/11/uk-spies-continue-quantum-insert-attack-via-linkedin-slashdot-
pages/) for example) things like Byzantine General's problems do not seem
quite so far fetched.

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graycat
The OP brings up a very old story in fault tolerance, reliable systems, and
systems management: In practice a very significant fraction of all outages are
due fairly directly to those famous words of the HAL 9000 "human error" or
people in the server farm 'bridge' or the network operations center (NOC)
doing the wrong things.

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ycskyspeak
I had absolutely no idea what a Byzantine fault was and to be honest I
probably still have a very peripheral grasp of what the author is trying to
make fun of. What I love about this is that you can sense the buildup of
frustration that the author felt which then got released in the form of this
paper, hilariously entertaining.

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ivanhoe
Very little real info and too much of what author probably believes to be a
humor, but it's just pretentious BS...

~~~
sanderjd
Nah, the author thinks right, it's humor.

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jimktrains2
Just wondering: what does the [scribd] mean in the title? I thought this was a
warning for the poor usability and difficulty to download from site
[http://www.scribd.com](http://www.scribd.com). This links directly to a pdf,
so wouldn't a [pdf] tag be better? I've noticed this on a bunch of posts
recently.

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judk
It's a HN auto-tag, to promote a Scribd, a YC company.

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cfqycwz
More specifically, it's actually a link to a copy of the same pdf hosted on
scribd, the intention being to offer a means of viewing the pdf that's less
cumbersome than Adobe Reader.

~~~
jimktrains2
Interesting. I never clicked on it so I never noticed it was an additional
link!

I've never liked the scribd interface, but what's more is that Chrome and FF
have their own, decent, pdf viewers which are light-years better than either
the scribd or adobe viewers.

I wonder how much HN gets to put that link there.

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icebraining
HN is owned by YCombinator. Scribd was founded under the YCombinator program.
There's really not much to it.

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jimktrains2
I never see any other links like that for YC companies (and there are a lot of
YC companies) on HN; that's why I was curious.

Aside: Why can I respond to you and not cmelbye?

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ics
> Why can I respond to you and not cmelbye?

There is a timer on new posts before anyone can reply. It's to force people to
think a little before they post and is pretty effective in rate-limiting
flamewars.

