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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,299 posts.
Why SQLite does not use Git (2018)
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How does iCloud work? Plus a new version of Cirrus
Differences between CloudKit and iCloud Drive, what each does, and how it works. New version of Cirrus to test and check iCloud function.
Making the most of Apple Silicon power: 2 Core capabilities (2022)
P cores are conventional in that they can deliver excellent performance at maximum frequency, but with high power use. E cores may take 4 times as long for a task, but use less than a third of the …
Resilience in Complex Systems (2021)
Everyday human reasoning breaks down as the scale of time and space at play increases. Complex systems thinking gives us a new set of tools to better understand the chains of consequences involved, and make better decisions.
I am dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and potential treatments are out of reach
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. Alex Tabarrok writes about how “when the FDA fails to approve a good drug, people die but the bo…
Important Coding Habits
The most important coding habits are those that enable us to enjoy this craft for years to come. Here are tips for programming without pain.
Why even let users set their own passwords?
Today we seem to be living through a war on passwords. This is manifested in various ways; in its most passive form, it takes the form of people blogging about how passwords are bad. The more material changes are the general trend towards no longer treating passwords as a sufficient condition for access in favour of…
Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops
Talk transcript on various patterns that slowly influence how teams deal with reliability, and highlight some of the key interactions and behaviors I keep finding work well in the organizations I've been part of.
Bun v0.7.0
vite dev support, Workers, bun --smol, WebSocket.ping(), structuredClone(), serialize() and better Node.js compatibility
Apple's interactive television box: Hacking the set top box System 7.1 in ROM
This article has been revised with recollections and corrections from former Apple employee Al Kossow, some good folks on Hacker News and t...
AWS networking concepts in a diagram
Before March 2023 I couldn’t for the life of me understand what was going on in the AWS VPC dashboard. I mean, look at the length of the scrolling bar on the left-hand panel! So, with the goa…
What we talk about when we talk about system design
Early in my research career, I had a chance to work with some of the best system researchers1 in the world on a number of really interesting system designs. One of the enjoyable aspects of research was the particular process used by researchers (particularly in the SOSP/OSDI community) to come up with novel yet…
Compromised Microsoft key: More impactful than we thought
Our investigation of the security incident disclosed by Microsoft and CISA and attributed to Chinese threat actor Storm-0558, found that this incident seems to have a broader scope than originally assumed. Organizations using Microsoft and Azure services should take steps to assess potential impact.
Internet search tips
A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.
Advice for Operating a Public-Facing API
I've been operating Pushover 's public-facing API for over a decade now and I thought I'd pass on some advice for those creating a new API.
Managing Kitchen Fruit Flies with a Little Shop of Horrors
I live in Seattle on a fairly wooded property. Every summer since we’ve moved here, we end up with swarms of fruit flies in the kitchen. They congregate around the compost bin and the fruit bowl (where there are always lots of bananas). We aren’t slobbish - I do the dishes and wipe down the counters every night, take…
Book Review: The Laws of Trading
Finalist #10 in the Book Review Contest
FreeWilly 1 and 2, two new open-access LLMs
Stability AI and its CarperAI lab are proud to announce FreeWilly1 and its successor FreeWilly2, two powerful new, open access, Large Language Models (LLMs). Both models demonstrate exceptional reasoning ability across varied benchmarks.
Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
A group of prominent scientists spread misinformation about COVID's origins. Mainstream journalists missed the story.
Diablo
All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.
RFC 9420 a.k.a. Messaging Layer Security
Messaging Layer Security has been published. MLS is the first standardized, fully specified, freely accessible end-to-end encryption protocol.
How Turborepo is porting from Go to Rust
Our strategy for making updates and maintaining stability while we migrate languages.
Rethinking Infrastructure as Code from Scratch
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure complexity, and the current state of infrastructure as code. This is problem space that many talented people are tackling.
Small joys of programming in Odin
Update (2023-07-21): I was being a bit overly brief with liberal use of ... to mean “unimportant” in the code examples. Ginger Bill (creator of Odin) noted it might be clearer to have more correct/explicit Odin and Zig code for the examples given people would be less familiar. Those has been updated For the past few…
I have written a JVM in Rust
I have built a toy Java Virtual Machine in Rust, complete with garbage collection, exception handling, and the ability to run real Java bytecode using OpenJDK's rt.jar.
Quench of LHC inner triplet magnet causes a small leak with major consequences
At 1.00 a.m. + 17 seconds on Monday, 17 July, the LHC beams were dumped after only 9 minutes in collision due to a radiofrequency interlock caused by an electrical perturbation. Approximately 300 milliseconds after the beams were cleanly dumped, several superconducting magnets around the LHC quenched – i.e. they lost…
Nanosecond timestamp collisions are common
I was wondering: how often do nanosecond timestamps collide on modern systems? The answer is: very often, like 5% of all samples, when reading the clock on all 4 physical cores at the same time. As a result, I think it is unsafe to assume that a raw nanosecond timestamp is a unique identifier.