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ah-on Managing containers on Mesos with HalfLife2

Doom as an Interface for Process Management: https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html

ah-on Swift for Windows

Codeplex still exists?

ah-on .NET Core RC2 – Improvements, Schedule, and Roadmap

I absolutely love the Open and transparent way of developing software and the progress you've made is amazing.

ah-on Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL

Apache Kafka client for dotnet/C#: https://github.com/ah-/rdkafka-dotnet

Kafka is amazing, the new open source dotnet as well, and this brings both together.

ah-on Simple instructions for freezing a Skylake Processor

This talk from the 32c3 just two weeks ago looks at exactly that problem. They have "chicken bits" (not sure if that's the technical term :)) which can turn off certain features, and they can patch microcode.

https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7171-when_hardware_must_just_wor...

  Software design and testing is hard, but what happens when each bug fix can cost months of delay and millions of dollars? In this talk we’ll take a behind-the-scenes look at the challenges in the design of a very complex, yet critical piece of hardware: the modern x86 CPU.

ah-on Is REST Best in a Microservices Architecture?

That polling endpoint is a message bus, just disguised as a REST endpoint.

You point about the SPOF is that you prefer distributed state inside the individual services over having events stored in the message bus? Then you're back to high coupling between the inventory manager and notifier, if the former is down the latter won't be able to send out any notifications.

ah-on Back to 28: Grub2 Authentication 0-Day

There was a similar bug in the Ubuntu lock screen a while algo: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1308572

  When the screen is locked with password, if I hold ENTER after some
  seconds the screen freezes and the lock screen crashes. After that I
  have the computer fully unlocked.

ah-on Apache Kafka 0.9 is released

The C/C++ client, will that be librdkafka? If I need a high-quality client for another language, would you recommend building that using librdkafka or the rest proxy?

ah-on Inception

See https://github.com/google/inception/blob/master/inception.ip...

ah-on Should I Use Signed or Unsigned Ints?

Probably because Apple hasn't really updated bash since the license switch to GPLv3.

ah-on How We Deploy Python Code

conda works pretty well.

ah-on You don't need to daemonize

Seeing then FQDN with the trailing dot I wonder how much software breaks when you use it. I bet the duplicate check here doesn't treat homepage.ntlworld.com. and homepage.ntlworld.com as equal.

ah-on Unpacking Git packfiles

I wonder how the packing process works. How does it find pairs of objects that compress well with delta encoding?

ah-on GNU social and GNU FM

From https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/tree/master:

GNU social is a free social networking platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short status updates, do polls, announce events, or other social activities (and you can add more!). Users can choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or colleagues' status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Google+ or Facebook, but is much more awesome.

ah-on Mad Map: Python Road

This is C++ style thinking, but that way it has to copy the array and run that function on every element. If it supports none it can just return the original data.

ah-on Perl Cannot Be Parsed: A Formal Proof (2008)

Building advanced tools like a static analyzer is much harder / partly impossible because you can't parse it without running it.

ah-on Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013)

The great thing about K/Q is it's simplicity and minimalism. It's fast because it doesn't do very much and doesn't have layers upon layers of abstractions.

I would love to see a derivate of it with proper async support and more useful error messages.

ah-on Ruins of forgotten empires: APL Languages (2013)

KDB is actually free nowadays if you can live with the 32bit limitation.

ah-on InfluxDB Clustering Design – Neither CP or AP

Really interesting! Just to confirm I understood the basics correctly:

Write means append, to a timeseries which is keyed by a timestamp, and is identified by some name? If a write succeeds only partially, different servers have different data. And a read might return any of these versions. After some time the anti-entropy repair will kick in, and merge the diverging timeseries. Merging means taking the union of all data points.

Where do the timestamps come from, the client? So if a client retries a partially successful write, it'll have the same timestamp and will be merged during repair. Are timestamps within a timeseries monotonically increasing?

The hinted handoff sounds like it is motivated by a similar problem that the Kafka in sync replica set tackles. Do you have any views on the pros/cons of your approach via ISR sets? I think Kafka uses ZK for the ISR management which means it wouldn't work with the availability requirements of InfluxDB, but could a modified version work?

So overall InfluxDB is sacrificing lots of consistency for availability. Since the CP part of the system is actually cached, the entire system is really AP? If not, what parts are not AP? Modification of the CP part, like creation of new timeseries?

From a users perspective I could see it being useful to have a historical part of the timeseries that's guaranteed to be stable, and an in-flux part where the system hasn't settled yet. Then one could run run expensive analytics on the historical part, without having to recalculate everything on the next read since the data could have changed since then. You're already hashing your data and building a Merkle Tree, maybe that would make it possible to implement something like that.

ah-on Databranches: using Git as a database (2011)

http://ipfs.io/ uses very similar concepts.

ah-on Bitcointalk Server Compromised

What's the best way nowadays to protect yourself as a user against this? You certainly can't trust anyone to store your password securely, so you're forced to have a strong password per site, and it's impossible to memorize that many passwords.

I'm currently using Password Hasher (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/password-hasher-pl...), but that only works well because I mostly use just one machine.

ah-on CSV Challenge

A bit overkill since it could do so much more than just filtering nulls, but here is a KDB/Q oneliner:

`:20150425.csv 0: csv 0: (`Name; `$"Credit Card") xcol select name,creditcard from (.j.k raze read0`:data.json) where 0n<>first each creditcard

ah-on Liblfds, a portable, license-free, lock-free data structure library written in C

While reading the rather hilarious blog of his, I stumbled upon this possible explanation why that sentence is gone:

I'm going to ditch LL/SC implementations, in part because they're just too unreliable and in part because they prevent the library from being able to simply offer the caller a choice - "garbage collection or not?" which in turn removes a TON of stuff which otherwise has to be explained to the end user.

http://www.liblfds.org/blog/index.php?entry=Quick-update

ah-on Project Fi by Google

The big thing about this from my perspective is that it abolishes roaming. One plan, and you pay the same whether you use it in your home country or anywhere else. I'm not aware that anybody else is offering that, especially not at that price.

As a German living in the UK i currently juggle two SIM cards, and whenever I fly back home I have to mess with the data flatrate there since it's worth activating the monthly flatrate plan even if I just use it for a day. And then I have to make sure that I don't forget to cancel the flatrate when I leave again. Not to mention that this means I have two phone numbers, and I'm not reachable on at least one of them all the time.

ah-on KDB bindings for Lua

You can use this to link with nginx+lua/openresty/whatever to get a Q-powered web service that can do more than a few thousand connections per second.

Cool stuff! I can see a single machine running this being loads faster than a whole elaborate cluster of php/perl/python/node servers even with some caching.

Could this also work with just the integrated web server in q? I never tried it, but I wonder why lua is involved? Is it supposed to run parts of the logic in lua? Or does just using nginx as a reverse proxy not work well?

ah-on Athame – Full vim for bash and readline

Looks interesting, how does it actually work? I'm quite surprised to see the --INSERT-- in the bottom left all the time.

Also, ctrl-x-e

ah-on Introducing OpenBSD's httpd [pdf]

> I add the label "featuritis" to remind us of extra features (eg. ldap) that we reject now but might want to reinspect later.

That sounds absolutely reasonable and like a good policy.

ah-on Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

On a related note, I've been looking at GPU switching on Macbooks, mostly to get it working better on Linux.

This work might also be useful to keep 2011 MBPs with a damaged dedicated GPU working with just the Intel card. If you have a 2011 MBP and are willing to spend some time developing a software workaround that at least lets you use it with Intel only, check out https://github.com/ah-/gmux-scripts/issues/1#issuecomment-68... and https://github.com/codykrieger/gfxCardStatus/issues/150

ah-on Public and private sector efficiency

Written by the EPSU, from the last page:

EPSU is the European Federation of Public Service Unions. It is the largest federation of the ETUC and comprises 8 million public service workers from over 275 trade unions; EPSU organises workers in the energy, water and waste sectors, health and social services and local and national administration, in all European countries including in the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood.

ah-on Impending kOS

In case anybody is still interested, it's now up on http://kparc.com/cs107/readme