Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Without a doubt.

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. Leslie Lamport.

http://amturing.acm.org/p558-lamport.pdf

My first introduction to time scales as a partial ordering. Very mind opening.




Never did it for me. Always seemed totally trivial. What else could it possibly be!? It seems like a direct simplification of Einstein (... no global time ... spatially separated locations communicate with signals ... signals propagate in finite time ... proper time is an ordering along a world line ... relative time depends on communication ... there are spacelike separations where events do not have a defined temporal order ...). I guess they had first access to the fruit tree in those days.

I once spoke to Henri Gouraud after he gave a talk. He was very self-deprecating and acutely embarrassed that his name was attached to a blindingly obvious first-thing-that-comes-into-your-head shading expression-that-barely-deserves-the-name-algorithm. Sometimes that low hanging stuff gives you stomach ache.


A somewhat lighter take on similar issues that I also enjoyed was:

"Designing croquet's TeaTime: a real-time, temporal environment for active object cooperation", David Reed :

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1094855.1094861


Your link is throwing a 404 for me. I found it here: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~cs230/reading/time.pdf


That is not the paper. It appears to be a summary.


Exactly I worked my way backwards to this paper while exploring real world distributed systems like Kafka and Zookeeper and it was exceptionally well written paper that explained the basics of building distributed systems




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: