Leading off today, Google Cloud Platform lowers their prices and announces the availability of preemptible VMs. These are short-term, volatile instances that are useful in large compute clusters because they can be taken down at any moment. It is an interesting idea and something to watch long term. Amazon AWS did not announce a similar offering (yet), but they did announce the release of OpsWorks for Windows.

As always, enjoy today’s items, and please participate in the discussions on these sites.

Startups, Career and Process

• what could go wrong? | mrchlblng
• 7 Mistakes You’re Making In Your Programming Career | Making the Complex Simple

Development

• Intro to Higher Order Functions | Philosophy of Programming
• We have a problem with promises | pouchdb
• Using Monads in C++ to Solve Constraints: 3. The Tale of Two Monads | Bartosz Milewski
• When everything you know is wrong, part one | Eric Lippert

AI, Machine Learning, Research and Advanced Algorithms

• The easy way to implement a Red-Black tree | Garrison Jensen
• Fibonacci number system | John D. Cook
• Finding Perrin Pseudo Primes_Part 2 | Solipsys

Big Data, Visualization, SQL and NoSQL

• How does Hibernate NONSTRICT_READ_WRITE CacheConcurrencyStrategy work | Vlad Mihalcea
• RavenDB Sharding: Enabling shards for existing database | Ayende @ Rahien

Security, Encryption and Cryptography

• Elliptic Curve Cryptography: a gentle introduction | Andrea Corbellini
• AEADs: getting better at symmetric cryptography | ImperialViolet
• Sniffing GSM traffic with HackRF. | Ziggy’s of the World

IaaS, PaaS, Saas and *aas

• Introducing Preemptible VMs, a new class of compute available at 70% off standard pricing | Google Cloud Platform
• AWS OpsWorks for Windows | AWS Official Blog

Link Collections

• Visual Studio Tips – The Daily Six Pack: May 18, 2015 | Dirk Strauss
• Double Shot #1503 | A Fresh Cup
• Dew Drop – May 18, 2015 (#2016) | Morning Dew