ericbarrett

There are some older fsync() bugs (as famously explored by Postgres developers: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Fsync_Errors ) but I'm not aware of any modern mainstream kernel where this is broken. If I'm wrong, please tell me!

An application that really wants confidence in a write—to the extent that the underlying device and drivers allow—should use O_DIRECT. Or maybe there is a modern equivalent with io-uring. But that is not easy engineering :)

> We were not permitted to escalate to engineering at all.

I have no words! Except that I really want to know the organizational dysfunction that ended up creating that policy.

> (you sign away all rights to the things you made free)

I don't see that in Autodesk's terms, which (per quick search - not exhaustive) seem to apply to "Fusion for Personal Use":

https://www.autodesk.com/company/terms-of-use/en/general-ter...

The only license I can find it compels is "If You provide Autodesk with ideas for improvement, suggestions, or other feedback".

(Not a lawyer, not your lawyer, not legal advice etc. etc.)

SF had a ton of cheap, low-occupancy warehouses in Soma until the mid-late 2000s. Many have since been renovated into swanky offices.

Agreed, and a great example of the signal often hidden in anodyne corporate titles.

Did you block cookies?

I’ve never had problems getting to any Anubis site even with uBlock origin and uMatrix. You have to enable cookies and scripting for the main domain.

That is Anubis trying to get your browser to do proof of work: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

Seconded. Pretty sure the narrator is the same voice actor too

(Edit) yup: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ridings

Do you mean gtk-rs (https://gtk-rs.org/)? I have done a bit of programming with it. I respect the work behind it, but it is a monumental PITA - truly a mismatch of philosophies and design - and I would a thousand times rather deal with C/C++ correctness demons than attempt it again, unless I had hard requirements for soundness. Even then, if you use gtk-rs you are pulling in 100+ crate dependencies and who knows what lurks in those?

I once got asked to write a Levenshtein edit distance calculator for a “15 minute” SRE phone screen

For me, XXX is a mental note to "fix this before your next pull request." If I'm being serious I'll set up CI to reject any code with a comment containing this string. So in that sense it would be the highest priority.

I am neither a mathematician nor a scientist, so I’m unqualified to judge Wolfram’s current theories* of physics and computation. But my impression is that he remains quite rigorous in his work, even if the path he’s walking is far from the main. And of course he’s quite bombastic, which always seems to raise hackles. In fact, the article on which this discussion anchors is a great example of both.

* Ref: https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/ The podcast with Sean Carroll that parent mentioned is also a surprisingly accessible lay introduction, definitely worth a listen.

I'm not sure this is still true. I'm just a hobbyist but esp-idf, for example, supports C++23.

Indeed, the NYPD has 33,000 officers and Belgium's armed forces have 24,000 serving plus 6000 reserve. They also have very similar budgets: $6b vs. €7b.

Sometimes I stand in the sun and feel it as hot as a nearby oven on my skin. Then I consider that I'm receiving about 1e-24 of its radiant energy. I don't blame our ancestors!

Among other things, the USB host polls the keyboard at a fixed rate. Fantastic breakdown if you have 30 minutes: https://youtu.be/wdgULBpRoXk

The alignment greatly reduced the amount of energy/propellant/weight to launch the Voyager missions with all four of the outer planets on the menu. Alignments that allow you to reach a smaller set of the outer planets with the same budget are more common: years or decades.

(Edit) Another thought, since you mentioned time—numerical computing power and the math required to exercise it have advanced greatly since the 1970s, and it's likely that some of the trajectories and maneuvers feasible (again with the same fuel budget) today, even if they took 100+ years to complete, weren't even calculable back then.

A query for a given item goes to a router*, as you said, that directs it to a given shard which holds the data. I don't know Uber's schema, but usually the data is "denormalized" and you are not doing too many JOINs etc. Probably a caching layer in front as well.

If you think this sounds more like a job for a K/V store than a relational database, well, you'd be right; this is why e.g. Facebook moved to MyRocks. But MySQL/InnoDB does a decent job and gives you features like write guarantees, transactions, and solid replication, with low write latency and no RAFT or similar nondeterministic/geographically limited protocols.

* You can also structure your data so that the shard is encoded in the lookup key so the "routing" is handled locally. Depends on your setup

This was a great writeup, really clear and engagingly written, about an interesting and subtle bug. If the author hadn't mentioned they were 15 I would have assumed it was from a seasoned security professional.

To Daniel/hackermondev: whatever you're doing, keep it up!

Timeshift (included with Mint, but I don't think it's exclusive to it?) is a much more conventional solution—I believe it uses rsync under the hood—but it works very well for exactly this kind of experimentation. It can revert config changes, package installs, and even OS major version upgrades.

Tangential—methanol poisoning from an improper brewing or distilling process is largely, maybe completely, a myth. Where toxicity events have occurred they are almost always deliberate or accidental adulteration, e.g. fortifying moonshine with industrially "denatured" (deliberately poisoned) alcohol. There has been a lot of sloppy journalism in such cases that doesn't question the myth, as well as Prohibition-era propaganda that lives on to this day.

Great Reddit discussion about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/9p1fwe/methanol_...

The good ol’ “Tell me you store passwords as plaintext without telling me you store passwords as plaintext”

The other message I get from sites like this is, “Our developers have no idea how to escape SQL parameters even though this has been standard since the 90s [80s? 70s?!] so we just do “‘“ + password + “‘“ “

Right, this is a possibility—but complex life doing so, in vacuum, at 100K? All I'm saying is, knowing what we know about chemistry, it seems extremely unlikely.

I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong empirically, but it doesn't make sense to start our search there.

Radiation levels on Europa's surface are about 5 Sv in 24 hours, which is a massive dose; for reference, this is enough to kill 50% of humans exposed to it and make the survivors extremely ill.

It is also extremely cold (-171C mean) and near-vacuum (100 nanopascal).

If there is life in Europa and it bears any resemblance whatsoever to the biology we know, it simply couldn't exist on the surface. Even the hardiest single-celled organisms here, which have also had 4.5B years to evolve into uncontested niches, could barely survive a limited exposure to these factors.

I did something similar between jobs—built a k8s "cluster" on my home Linux box using kops+qemu. It didn't make me an experienced admin, but it was really enlightening and fun! Projects like these are a great way to learn.

Mass does not strictly matter, it is the ground TWR of the launch config. Heavier rockets do tend to have a lower TWR but it is not a universal rule.

Starliner is also held for confirmation of all systems being functional even with the SRBs. Better to let them burn out on the pad and clean up the mess than to risk release with, say, asymmetrical thrust. That said I'm sure there are variances between the two rockets' procedures which could make one appear faster.

This has to do with the launch vehicle's thrust to weight ratio (TWR) on the ground with a full tank. It's usually between 1.1 and 1.4. The Russian Proton has a famously high ground TWR and is known for "leaping" off the pad. Maybe Starliner is the same in this initial crewed LEO config.

When I started in tech I worked for a storage vendor’s tech support. One of my first big cases was troubleshooting why a customer’s files older than a week were disappearing. Given the topic, I’m sure you can guess—they had it mounted under /tmp and the cleanup script was doing its thing.

Hopefully the new Debian version of this script is a bit smarter!

Multipart uploads are not the same as append; an object being multipart-uploaded doesn't exist in the bucket namespace until the upload is finalized, and once that is done it cannot be modified without overwriting.