A short thread about Flexible Paxos (fpaxos.github.io) 🧵 The traditional Paxos algorithm requires proposers to communicate with a majority of acceptors in both phase 1 and phase 2. For example, if you have 5 acceptors, proposers need to hear from at least 3 acceptors in phase 1 to proceed to phase 2.

As per tradition, the last question of my final exam asked students to write a funny haiku about distributed systems for 1 point of extra credit. Last year, someone submitted imgur.com/HNungMp -- so this year I said memes are also acceptable.

Thread of my favorites! ⬇️ I have some advice
for the internet of things:
it should eat my shorts

Just went on a tirade at a poor unsuspecting student, so now you get it, too!

So, the student was asking whether it's impossible to have a version control system that always automatically resolves merge conflicts, saying that he suspected it was. The collaborative text editing problem boils down to how to merge conflicting strings. Here's one deterministic merge function: given the two strings, always return the empty string!