Hacker News Reader

grep_iton Python's experimental JIT to be removed

I've had good success with just using mypyc (https://mypyc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html) on typed python code.

grep_iton Distributed Systems Classics (2017)

Lamport lists his collected works on his site[0] along with some commentary for each one, and directly mentions, The Maintenance of Duplicate Databases, as the origin for logical clock paper. Many of the notes have interesting commentary.

> Many computer scientists claim to have read it. But I have rarely encountered anyone who was aware that the paper said anything about state machines. People seem to think that it is about either the causality relation on events in a distributed system, or the distributed mutual exclusion problem. People have insisted that there is nothing about state machines in the paper. I've even had to go back and reread it to convince myself that I really did remember what I had written.[1]

0: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net 1: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#time-clocks

grep_iton Creepy Crawlies

Did you read the article?

“[…]because we can generate 1.2 METRIC BAJILLION valid URLs just for a single fork of linux.git.”

grep_iton Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache

Sibling comment touched on it, and I guess rust does offer just that, but void casting and doing explicit offset checks for a field is one reason. You can kind of think of it like a tuple in that way and a db engine might use a similar technique.

grep_iton Don't use musl if you care about performance

I think the size of linked binaries and simplicity were always the main features?

grep_iton Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache

This reminds me how you can save a bunch of bytes just by making sure your structs are aligned. In go for example:

  type Wasteful struct {
    a int16
    b int
    c byte
  }

  type Aligned struct {
    b int
    a int16
    c byte
  }

Will have sizes of 24bytes and 16bytes (on a 64bit system). Same data 8bytes more. If you are storing millions of those objects, then it adds up.

grep_iton Elevators

I always come back to this game whenever I'm at a hotel for a conference waiting for the elevator.

grep_iton Open Source Low Tech

Awesome resource, thanks for sharing!

grep_iton Do you even need a database?

Except that eventually you'll find you lose a write when things go down because the page cache is write behind. So you start issuing fsync calls. Then one day you'll find yourself with a WAL and buffer pool wondering why you didn't just start with sqlite instead.

grep_iton Who are the companies that still use Perl in their back end?

Last I heard, DuckDuckGo backend was Perl.

grep_iton Ask HN: Scheduling stateful nodes when MMAP makes memory accounting a lie

Relevant: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2022/cidr2022-p13-crotty.pdf

grep_iton Why do we need dithering?

I love the authors style!

grep_iton Grayskull: A tiny computer vision library in C for embedded systems, etc.

Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications 2nd Edition is free to download for personal use at https://szeliski.org/Book/

grep_iton By the Power of Grayscale

Really enjoyed this article, thanks for sharing!

I had recently learned about using image pyramids[1] in conjunction with template matching algorithms like SAD to do simple and efficient object recognition, it was quite fun.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_%28image_processing%29

grep_iton Disable AI in Firefox

I'm actually not all that opposed to some of these features, but the way it's implemented is so clunky. The UI make it feel like a half baked browser extension.

grep_iton Unexpected productivity boost of Rust

Is this rage-bait? A language alone doesn't dictate reliability. There are tons of large scale systems out there running on Python. As for the language being, "flawed irreversibly", I'd be curious to hear you expand on that with examples.

grep_iton Ask HN: I just abandoned my PyCharm subscription, what should I use now?

I still use pycharm, but these days I satisfy my debugging with pudb (https://pypi.org/project/pudb/) which has been amazing and a good middle ground for the integrated debugger feel.

grep_iton Writing Toy Software Is a Joy

These are all great projects! When I find myself getting burnt out in my job I find that writing a little toy project usually helps be get back some spark. Some projects that weren't listed that I've enjoyed:

- GUI based bot for a small video game

- raft consensus algorithm

- ray casting

- simple b-tree or lsmtree storage engine

I'll also second chip8 emulator as being a good quick fun one! It helps there are ROMs that help quickly validate your implementation also (https://github.com/Timendus/chip8-test-suite)

grep_iton Tower Defense: Cache Control

> Why Not Redis? I have a single VPS, so I can get by with a simple SQLite database. If I had many instances of my API on separate servers

Just to push against this a bit. Redis can be very low memory cost and is very easy to run (I give it 5mb). I have a small single server with a few instances of my API that let's me cache pretty much everything I need.

grep_iton VVVVVV Source Code

There was a period of time in my life where I had recently moved to California from Canada and I was desperate for a job. I got a job doing door-to-door sales for Comcast. I hated it. I often sat in my car playing VVVVVV on my phone while shirking my responsibilities. Thank you Terry, for the reprieve.

grep_iton Hacking the Postgres Wire Protocol

> More complex examples, like IN (1, 2, 3) or id != 25 can be handled as well. For the former, we can hash all values and route the query to the matching shards. For the latter, we can do the opposite.

This makes it sound like the query would be routed to all shards except the one matching HASH(25). But wouldn't id != 25 need to go to all shards, since there could be values in the id set that hash to the same shard as 25?

grep_iton Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms

Thanks for the recommendation. Purchased both them!

grep_iton Do you really need foreign keys?

The responder to that issue has also written some blog posts that go into more detail on the subject.

* https://code.openark.org/blog/mysql/things-that-dont-work-we...

* https://code.openark.org/blog/mysql/the-problem-with-mysql-f...

grep_iton AWS us-east-1 down

ya, we're also seeing lambda failing across the board

grep_iton Instant flood fill with HTML Canvas

Ha, guilty (https://safari-sketch.com)! Was also annoyed by an iPad game my son played that tried to extract money out of him every play session. It served as a nice excuse to learn some technologies I wouldn't otherwise play with.

grep_iton Show HN: StratusGFX, my open-source real-time 3D rendering engine

Thanks for sharing your work, this kind of stuff is awesome! What resources did you use and find to be the most helpful when learning about this?

grep_iton Choosing a Postgres primary key

It also has the advantage that the page being written to, the right most leaf at the end of the index, is likely to always be available in the page cache. With random you may need to constantly go to disk to fetch the page.

grep_iton Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://siemens.blog/

My simple little Django blog. I don't update it as much as I'd like, but it does the job.

grep_iton Compilers are hard

I agree with you. In fact I would say understanding compilers is really pretty easy. They are some of the most well researched and documented subjects (in CS) out there. Almost all compilers are going to follow a similar structure of lex -> parse -> pass0 -> passN -> generation.

The challenge these days seems to be in the passes which can become numerous and complex.

grep_iton How to contact Google SRE by dropping a shell in Cloud SQL

Thanks for the share!