FeepingCreature

Investigating an Event Queue Hang

We had a fun bug last week that almost doubles as a logic puzzle. It makes perfect sense in hindsight, but as I was staring at it, it seemed every part of it was nailed down tight - until I spotted the obvious, natural assumption that had been violated from the start.

A bit of background. We're working with microservices propagating state with event streams. For a typical stream, most events will concern unrelated objects, so we parallelize them: each incoming event is assigned a key, and we accept parallel events so long as their keys don't collide with any events currently in progress. Furthermore, because we track our position in the input stream as a single number, we can't retire events as soon

HyperCrowd

Crippling Facebook

Facebook works with advertisers to target you. These instructions are one of the many ways to begin crippling that relationship. When AI targeting is crippled, your psychosecurity improves :)

1. On your desktop machine, goto https://accountscenter.facebook.com/ads/audience_based_advertising
2. Maximize the browser window
3. Press F12 and click on the Console tab
4. Select the code below, copy it, paste it upon the Console line (The area next to the > character in the Console window), and press enter:

timothyham

A Short IPv6 Guide for Home IPv4 Admins

This guide is for homelab admins who understand IPv4s well but find setting up IPv6 hard or annoying because things work differently. In some ways, managing an IPv6 network can be simpler than IPv4, one just needs to learn some new concepts and discard some old ones.

Let’s begin.

First of all, there are some concepts that one must unlearn from ipv4:

Concept 1

yoavg

Grand-master Level Chess without Search: Modeling Choices and their Implications

Yoav Golderg, February 2024.

---

Researchers at Google DeepMind released a paper about a learned systems that is able to play blitz-chess at a grandmaster level, without using search. This is interesting and imagination-capturing, because up to now computer-chess systems that play at this level, either based on machine-learning or not, did use a search component.[^1]

Indeed, my first reaction when reading the paper was to tweet wow, crazy and interesting. I still find it crazy and interesting, but upon a closer read, it may not be as crazy and as interesting as I initially thought. Many reactions on twitter, reddit, etc, were super-impressed, going into implications about projected learning abilities of AI systems, the ability of neural networks to learn semantics from observations, etc, which are really over-the-top. The paper does not claim any of them, but they are still perceiv

testanull

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import hashlib
import base64
import requests, string, struct, uuid, random, re
import sys
from collections import OrderedDict
from sys import version
from urllib3.exceptions import InsecureRequestWarning
requests.packages.urllib3.disable_warnings(category=InsecureRequestWarning)
# too lazy to deal with string <-> bytes confusion in python3 so forget it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

cpursley

PostgreSQL is Enough

• Simplify: move code into database functions
• Just Use Postgres for Everything
• PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
• Postgres is eating the database world
• Hacker News discussion

Background and Cron Jobs

AndrasKovacs

Garbage collection with zero cost at non-GC time

Every once in a while I investigate low-level backend options for PL-s, although so far I haven't actually written any such backend for my projects. Recently I've been looking at precise garbage collection in popular backends, and I've been (like on previous occasions) annoyed by limitations and compromises.

I was compelled to think about a system which accommodates precise relocating GC as much as possible. In one extreme configuration, described in this note, there

sharadhr

$HOME, Not So Sweet $HOME

• Preface
• 1 What is $HOME to you?
• 2 Setup
  • 2.1 Linux
    • 2.1.1 $HOME
    • 2.1.2 Dot-files and dot-directories
    • 2.1.3 XDG Base Directories
• 2.1.4 xdg-user-dirs

Julynx

Basic Tips - Intermediate Tips - Advanced Tips

candlerb

If someone asked me the question "what layout should I use for my Go code repository?", I'd start by asking back "what are you building: an executable, or a library?"

Single executable

Stage 1: single source file

Create a directory named however you want your final executable to be called (e.g. "mycommand"), change into that directory, and create the following files: