Most database systems support multiple isolation levels that enable their users to trade off exposure to various types of application anomalies and bugs for (potentially small) increases in potential transaction concurrency. For decades, the highest level of “bug-free correctness” offered by commercial database systems was “SERIALIZABLE” isolation in which the database system runs transactions in parallel, but in a way that is equivalent to as if they were running one after the other. We defined “serializable isolation” above as a guarantee that even though a database system is allowed to run transactions in parallel, the final result is equivalent to as if they were running one after the other.

My original plan turned out to simply be not fast enough: I’m using the Amsterdam Compiler Kit compiler, because it’s the only one which will generate 8080 machine code, but the code quality isn’t good and is very slow. (It would totally have worked had I written it in raw machine code…) I also took several other wrong turns later, all of which wasted time. Terminal support is now factored out into a standalone library, making it easy to support multiple terminal types, and for the Kaypro II and NC200 it supports the erase-until-end-of-line control code, making redraws a lot faster.

This is what I said:

Remarks as prepared

Forbes Philanthropy Summit

June 27, 2019

New York, New York

I’m honored to have the opportunity today to talk about my friend Paul Allen, this year’s recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Philanthropy. Seattle is also home to what I think might be Paul’s most lasting impact: the Allen Institute. In addition to the brain, the Institute has divisions that study cell science, bioscience and – as of last December, two months after Paul passed – immunology.

Huawei, a relatively new company in the telecom equipment space, has amassed top market share because its equipment—espionage vulnerabilities aside—is the best value on the market. American policymakers, unconcerned with industrial capacity, allowed Chinese companies to capture market share despite the predatory subsidies and stolen technology. The loss of an industrial base in telecom equipment meant that the American national security apparatus lost military capacity.

So I’d like to divert your esteemed attention to a certain, lesser known edge case, “Pool”, implemented by William George Brown and Ted Lewis in 1954 on the one-of-a-kind MIDSAC computer. MIDSAC was one of a pair of machines developed at the University of Michigan during 1951 and 1953 under a $500,000 sponsorship of the United States Air Force, the general purpose MIDAC (the Michigan Automatic Computer) and MIDSAC (Michigan Digital Special Automatic Computer), designed for real-time operations, particularly for guidance problems. According to Brown’s court testimony, the game was done for the sole purpose of the single demonstration in June 1954 and the pool simulation was chosen for its similarities to the guidance problems, which were MIDSAC’s true but classified purpose .

One Ford Foundation blog post described public-interest technologists as “technology practitioners who focus on social justice, the common good, and/or the public interest.” I think of public-interest technologists as people who combine their technological expertise with a public-interest focus, either by working on tech policy, working on a tech project with a public benefit, or working as a more traditional technologist for an organization with a public-interest focus. I want to close with a quote from Michael Brennan, also of the Ford Foundation: “The field of public interest tech brings people with specific technical expertise into the fight for social change: whether that means ensuring that biased algorithms don’t further prejudice the criminal justice system, understanding how marginalized communities are negatively impacted by “smart” technology, or examining the future of work as artificial intelligence and the gig economy upend the traditional rules of the economy.

Our backend is running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We make extensive use of GCP’s managed services and are always at the forefront of GCP’s evolution:

On the frontend we’ve built the InboxSDK library (https://www.inboxsdk.com) to power our best-in-class integration with Gmail. State and data synchronization is accomplished with a battle tested in-house framework that makes extensive use of streams will be very competitive with compensation, we’re not opening a Vancouver office to get cheap labor.

This is what I said:

I’m honored to have the opportunity today to talk about my friend Paul Allen, this year’s recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Philanthropy. But computers weren’t the only thing Paul was obsessed with back then. Seattle is also home to what I think might be Paul’s most lasting impact: the Allen Institute.

Today is my last day at IBM. If you’ve been following along, IBM bought my startup Resilient Systems in Spring 2016. Since then, I have been with IBM, holding the nicely ambiguous title of “Special Advisor.”

Ask HN: What do middle level managers do? I’m curious about what middle level managers do in these companies. Specifically, my manager’s manager, the ones between the CEO and first level management.