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Metalnem

852 karma · joined October 31, 2016

Nemanja Mijailovic

Blog: https://mijailovic.net/

GitHub: https://github.com/metalnem

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Metalnem··on Angry Metal Guy Speaks: On Spotify
As someone who's been reading Angry Metal Guy for more than seven years, I hated the decision to use the AI-generated images in this post, too. But don't let that get in the way of the main idea: buy albums on Bandcamp if you can afford it, use Apple Music or Tidal otherwise.
Metalnem··on Angry Metal Guy Speaks: On Spotify
For the unaware: on Bandcamp Fridays, artists and labels get 100% of what you pay. You can see the schedule for the rest of the year here:

https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays

https://isitbandcampfriday.com/

Metalnem··on Humble Tech Book Bundle: Linux Complete by Pearson
This is crazy value for money! I've been wanting to read Understanding Software Dynamics for some time, and that book alone costs €41 on ebooks.com.
Metalnem··on .NET 10 Preview 6 brings JIT improvements, one-shot tool execution
Also, if you want to see the full list of changes in .NET 10 (not just the latest preview), you can find it here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/whats-new/dotn...

Metalnem··on Fyre Festival sells troubled brand for just $245K on eBay
> It's a small price to pay for the Fyre Festival brand

Why on earth would the Fyre brand be worth anything at all?

Metalnem··on How I build software quickly
I love his writing too! I read this post a few days ago and really liked it, so I started going through his older posts. It's no coincidence that his writing is good—he's actively working to improve it: https://evanhahn.com/economist-style-guide-book-takeaways/.
Metalnem··on Fundamentals of garbage collection (2023)
I recently re-read this article and can confirm that it's excellent—not just this specific page, but all the other sections under "Garbage Collection" as well.

If you want to dive deeper into memory performance analysis in .NET, this is another must-read: https://github.com/Maoni0/mem-doc/blob/master/doc/.NETMemory...

It was written by Maoni Stephens, the architect of .NET's garbage collection.

Metalnem··on A Null Pointer Exception Brought Down Mighty Google;7 Hours of Downtime
This is a terrible article. It doesn’t cite its sources and, even worse, invents quotes. It's basically just an ad for some Panto AI tool.

Save yourself some time and just read the official incident report: https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...

Or the previous Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274563

Metalnem··on A Null Pointer Exception Brought Down Mighty Google;7 Hours of Downtime
They did! It was already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274563.
Metalnem··on I accidentally deleted Levels.fyi's entire back end server stack last week
Thanks for posting this—it's super interesting! I was just curious why the author of the Reddit post didn't publish it on their own blog, since it's definitely worth preserving there.
Metalnem··on I accidentally deleted Levels.fyi's entire back end server stack last week
Kudos for publishing this, but why is it on Reddit instead of the Levels.fyi blog (https://www.levels.fyi/blog/)?
Metalnem··on Unintended double encryption crippled our search engine performance
Great story! Successful cloud performance investigations are always extremely satisfying. I love this conclusion:

It’s a reminder that sometimes performance bottlenecks are hard to diagnose, but with careful debugging, good data, and collaboration with providers, even cloud-level issues can be resolved.

Metalnem··on Ask HN: What old or outdated software have you never found a replacement for?
ClickRepair (https://archive.clickrepair.org/software_info/clickrepair.ht...)
Metalnem··on The EU wants to decrypt your private data by 2030
It's sad to see Europe's influence fading, and instead of investing in innovation, politicians are focused on stripping even more freedoms from their citizens.
Metalnem··on Unhooking from Amazon Ebooks
I've been a Kindle user for over 15 years, but I finally stopped buying Kindle books after Amazon removed the "Download & Transfer via USB" option, effectively eliminating the ability to remove DRM.
Metalnem··on Show HN: A website for comparing Nespresso capsules
I believe that Nespresso measures the amount of caffeine in the final drink, assuming you used the correct serving size. For example, for Ispirazione Napoli (https://www.nespresso.com/tw/en/order/capsules/original/ispi...), they claim that "Per serving of Caffeine is 109mg/25ml".
Metalnem··on Google caused outage by ignoring its quality protections
This article doesn't add much beyond the official incident report, so it's better to just read that directly. Or read this analysis, which at least raises some interesting questions:

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/06/14/quick-takes-on-the...

Metalnem··on Quick takes on the GCP public incident write-up
The author raised some great questions! But as he admits, they are unlikely to be answered in public, which is why I usually find public retrospectives a bit underwhelming.

Service Control did not have the appropriate randomized exponential backoff implemented to avoid this. It took up to ~2h 40 mins to fully resolve in us-central-1 as we throttled task creation to minimize the impact on the underlying infrastructure and routed traffic to multi-regional databases to reduce the load.

If nothing else, this section of the incident report reminded me of my favorite distributed systems paper: Metastable Failures in Distributed Systems. You should definitely check it out if you haven't already:

https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s...

Metalnem··on The Sun Ra Arkestra's Maestro Hits One Hundred
You can find over a hundred of his records on Bandcamp: https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com.
Metalnem··on Launch HN: Fuzzbuzz (YC W19) – Fuzzing as a Service
I recently wrote a tool called SharpFuzz that enables fuzzing .NET programs with AFL (https://github.com/metalnem/sharpfuzz#trophies). It has found over 70 issues so far in various libraries (including the .NET standard library). The most common ones are unexpected exceptions (for example, method that should not throw anything throws IndexOutOfRangeException or NullReferenceException), but there are also many serious ones, such as temporary/permanent hangs, stack overflows, and process crashes.
Metalnem··on Exploring .NET Core platform intrinsics: Part 4 – Alignment and pipelining
I already tried that, but was disappointed that the performance gain was only 1%, which is why I didn't include the optimization in the post.
Metalnem··on Books I've read in the third quarter of 2017
You can’t do it with GitHub pages only (if you want to use a custom domain). I’m actually using free Cloudflare plan for terminating TLS connections.
Metalnem··on Books I've read in the third quarter of 2017
I listen to audiobooks when I’m walking to work and back—that’s an hour a day on average. That counts for at least 2000 pages in each quarter. I also read anything between 10 and 40 pages of technical books every day, which adds up a lot after three months.
Metalnem··on Removing Edge Magazine DRM
That's an interesting question. There is one thing that is unique to the Edge Magazine app on iOS, though. Zip archives of the magazine do not contain just pdf files, but also bunch of high resolution game screenshots. Those screenshots can be seen in the app by clicking the gallery button in a several places. The gallery button link is in the form media://image.jpg, which probably means that the application registered custom protocol handler and handles it by displaying image on top of the magazine itself. That's the way to recognize iOS version, but I'm not sure if Google Play Newsstand has the same feature.
Metalnem··on Removing Edge Magazine DRM
Yes, certificate pinning would have blocked my initial steps. But there is a tool for disabling certificate pinning validation on jailbroken iOS devices, called iOS SSL Kill Switch https://github.com/iSECPartners/ios-ssl-kill-switch.
Metalnem··on Removing Edge Magazine DRM
I thought about trying the "strings" command first, but I didn't expect that the password would be just laying there. Even if I found the "SavedPassword" string, I couldn't use it the way I did without jailbroken device, because configuration file that contained the saved password wasn't embedded in the application. The password was actually written to configuration file on the device first time it was used.
Metalnem··on Removing Edge Magazine DRM
You can decompress every .ipa files and see bunch of resources and configuration files in plaintext, which can falsely lead you to believe that you have everything decrypted, but the main binary file is still encrypted, and the only way to decrypt is by running software like Clutch on the jailbroken device.
Metalnem··on Removing Edge Magazine DRM
So there are more people who read Dark Horse comics and think like me :) Converting into CBZ directly was my initial idea, but then I discovered that there is direct download link to tar archive that contains all the images (I did that by following the network traffic of the iOS app). I didn't want to bother with half-baked JavaScript libraries to extract the tar archive and recompress it into zip, so I just quickly wrote a Go application to do that.