2161
OpenBSD Desktop
I am a minimalist, and I tend to always keep it as small as I can, so I try to use all I have in base (if it fits), plus of course some other tools needed.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
2162
Making Sense of Acquire-Release Semantics
Multiprocessor Synchronization was one of my favorite classes during my undergrad — it had a clear progression from theory to practice, starting at the theory of consensus numbers and moving onto atomic operations and then synchronization primitives and lock-free data structures, all from first principles. With…
2163
So We've Got a Memory Leak
A story of finding, understanding, and fixing a memory leak in our Rails app. With graphs and code!
2164
The world has probably passed peak pollution
Millions die prematurely from local air pollution, but we can reduce this number significantly.
2165
How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?
Over the last number of years, our planet has become encircled by Starlink, OneWeb, and other “megaconstellation” satellites.
2166
It's always TCP_NODELAY
The first thing I check when debugging latency issues in distributed systems is whether TCP_NODELAY is enabled. And it’s not just me. Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option, suggesting that the default behavior is wrong, and perhaps…
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UTC, Tai, and Unix Time (2001)
TAI times are identified by year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. There are exactly 86400 TAI seconds in every TAI day. TAI days are labelled by the Gregorian calendar.
2169
The Time I Lied to the CTO and Saved the Day
This was several years back. Keep in mind that early in my career, my father had told me that doing a good job often meant doing what needed to be done in spite of your boss. And by that he meant that you can either make your boss successful and happy or you can run every decision by your boss. In which case no one is…
2170
Opening Windows in Linux with sockets, bare hands and 200 lines of C
In this post I want to create a single file C file program to open a windows inside Linux without using xlib or any similar libraries. The idea is to explore X11 protocol and see how it is used to interact with X server to create windows.
2171
Stack Overflow users deleting answers after OpenAI partnership
In this ever changing and evolving world of user generated versus AI generated content, the recent announcement of Stack Overflow partnering with OpenAI recently has been met with some backlash by …
2172
Development Notes from xkcd's "Machine"
How we designed xkcd's massive rube goldberg machine game in 3 weeks.
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2174
The search for easier safe systems programming
I've been involved in the Rust project in some form or another since 2016, and it's a language I'm very comfortable using. Many Rust programmers could say the same . But, if we take a step back and are honest with ourselves, we'd admit that the road to getting to that level of comfort was difficult.
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Needle: A DFA Based Regex Library That Compiles to JVM ByteCode
Many years ago, Kragen complained about the implementation and performance of Java regexes , and suggested that an implementation that emitted JVM bytecode could perform better. It's been a minute, but I'm happy to report that complaining on the Internet has served its purpose.
2177
The Rise of the Forever Renter Class
On those who are unable or unwilling to buy a house in 2024 and what to do about it.
2178
The Birth of Parquet
15 years ago (2007-2011) I was at Yahoo! working with Map/Reduce and Apache Pig, which was the better Map/Reduce at the time. The Dremel paper just came out and, as everything I worked with seemed to be inspired from Google papers, I read it. I could see it applying to what we were doing at Yahoo! and this was to…
2179
We've been put in the vibe space
Search+recs+open-ended text boxes
2180
How Python asyncio works: recreating it from scratch
Learn how asyncio works by recreating it from scratch with Python generators and using the __await__ dunder method for the async/await keywords.
2181
Common Google XSS
A simple XSS in Google application
2182
Spending an afternoon in the Sizewell control-room simulator
I was recently lucky enough to be invited along on a trip to Sizewell Bs operations training centre to see and try their control room simulator.
2183
Arena-based parsers
The code is a bit "experimental" but it's available in the arena-fixes branch (make sure to enable --features=development if you run it from a Git repo).
2184
Clojure: Managing throughput with virtual threads
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
2185
Decompiling Hyper-V Manager to rebuild it from source
This post guides through decompiling Hyper-V Manager to rebuild it from source, aiming to assess its value for potential open-sourcing. It explores manual and automated decompilation processes, including troubleshooting and enhancing the tool, advocating for community-led improvements to this widely-used but neglected…
2186
How to Use the Foreign Function API in Java 22 to Call C Libraries
Using Java's Foreign Function API to Call C like fopen, fgets, and fclose.
2187
A useful productivity measure?
In my new role as VP of Engineering , there was one question I was dreading more than any other: “How are you measuring productivity?”
2188
Pair Your Compilers at the ABI Café
Not sure if your compilers have matching ABIs? Then put them through the ultimate compatibility crucible and pair them up on a shift at The ABI Café! Find out if your one true pairing fastcalls for each other or are just another slowburn disaster. (Maid outfits optional but recommended.)
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How LLMs Work, Explained Without Math
I'm sure you agree that it has become impossible to ignore Generative AI (GenAI), as we are constantly bombarded with mainstream news about Large Language Models (LLMs). Very likely you have tried…
2190
Bollards: Why and What
Naming something we see and benefit from every day