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Long Term Software Development Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: Hacker News Bert Hubert reflects on the Dutch Electoral Board's open-source Abacus vote tabulation software, emphasizing the distinction between software typically deployed as a service—characterized by continuous development and automated testing—and critical software used in high-stakes environments like elections, power plants, and machinery. These sectors favor stability and well-documented changes over frequent updates, which can introduce the risk of malfunctions. Hubert's presentation included insights from his followers on Mastodon about long-term software development, underscoring the importance |
Day 2 of learning Ruby - Clicky Things aka. a simple mouse event wrapper for Ruby2D Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: /r/ruby Failed to fetch content - HTTP Status - 403 |
Security Engineering - A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems (Textbook) Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: /r/programming The third edition of "Security Engineering" is now available as an e-book for $44 from Wiley and Amazon, with physical copies purchasable from Amazon in the USA and UK. Free downloads of individual chapters and a complete PDF of the book are accessible. The book has received positive endorsements, including praise for being the best in its field. Accompanying the book are fifteen teaching videos created for a security engineering class at Edinburgh University. The author expresses gratitude for feedback on errors and has provided err |
How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: Hacker News The summary discusses a study on improving the speed of SQLite for analytical queries by leveraging Bloom filters, making it up to ten times faster. SQLite, a B-tree structured, row-based storage database, primarily excels in OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) workloads but was found to lag behind DuckDB in handling analytical queries, specifically those adhering to the Star Schema Benchmark (SSB), which includes complex joins between large fact tables and smaller dimension tables. Researchers discovered that SQLite's performance issues stemmed from certain op |
How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: /r/programming The content discusses how researchers enhanced SQLite's performance for analytical queries by implementing Bloom filters, making it 10 times faster. It summarizes the findings from the paper "SQLite: Past, Present, and Future" (2022) and provides an overview of SQLite's architecture, which uses a B-tree on disk for row-based storage and a virtual machine (VDBE) to execute queries. Although SQLite generally excels in Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) workloads, a study from Buffalo University in 201 |
Eradicating N+1s: The Two-phase Data Load and Render Pattern in Go Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: /r/programming The author discusses the N+1 query problem, which occurs when a single database query is followed by multiple additional queries for associated records as each object is processed. This is a prevalent issue in web applications, often leading to performance degradations. The author illustrates this with an example involving a Product model that lazily loads associated data, resulting in a series of database queries (1 initial query plus N lazy loads). They emphasize the commonality of this issue, noting its prevalence second only to forgotten indexes in |
GPT-5 is behind schedule Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: Hacker News Failed to fetch content - HTTP Status - 401 |
Quantum Hype Has Reached The Point Of Absurdity Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: /r/programming Of course! Please provide the content you'd like me to summarize. |
Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: Hacker News Matthias, a founder at Corelatus, specializes in telecom hardware focused on E1/T1 and SDH/SONET interfaces, particularly working on layer 2 signaling (SS7 MTP-2, ATM, frame relay) and the Erlang control system for embedded hardware. He invites contact via his email, [email protected]. In a recent post, Matthias discusses identifying telephone network signaling from the 1982 Pink Floyd film "The Wall," specifically during |
Reads Causing Writes in Postgres Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: Hacker News The article discusses the importance of routinely inspecting the performance of SQL statements in a PostgreSQL instance by using the `pg_stat_statements` view. This view provides statistics about executed SQL statements, including the `shared_blks_dirtied` and `shared_blks_written` columns, which track how many data blocks in the shared buffer cache are modified and written to disk. An interesting point noted is that even simple SELECT queries can yield non-zero values in these columns, suggesting that read-only statements can |
Flux: A DNF and Flatpak wrapper written in shell Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: /r/programming The content emphasizes the importance of user feedback and encourages contributions to a package manager wrapper for DNF and Flatpak. Users can participate by fixing bugs, adding features, or improving documentation through a straightforward process of forking the repository, creating a branch, and submitting a pull request. Additionally, users are invited to report any issues or suggestions. Further details can be found in the documentation. |
The essays of Michel de Montaigne online Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: Hacker News Short searches with one or two words are more effective than longer queries on the HyperEssays website, which offers a modern, accessible edition of Michel de Montaigne's Essays. Users can choose which edition to search, and the search is case-insensitive. Certain function words are excluded from search results unless part of a phrase. HyperEssays focuses on the text of the Essays, offering four editions with updated annotations and formats for easy reading on various devices. The project aims to provide context and resources |
Scathing book reviews of 2024 Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: Hacker News The content provides a satirical overview of notable book reviews from 2024, particularly highlighting a selection of poorly received works, including Melania Trump’s memoir, Haruki Murakami's latest novel, Lionel Shriver’s satire, and Malcolm Gladwell’s extension of his brand. Specifically, Naomi Fry critiques Melania Trump's memoir, describing it as a shallow and uninsightful account filled with clichés, ultimately portraying the First Lady as an enigmatic figure rather than a relatable individual. Fry argues that |
Concurrencia en Erlang Published: 2024-12-22 | Origin: /r/programming El texto discute la historia de Erlang y su evolución en relación con la concurrencia y el paralelismo. Aunque Erlang ya soportaba concurrencia desde sus inicios en los años 80, en ese momento solo era posible ejecutar procesos en un solo núcleo, lo que limitaba el paralelismo a configuraciones de múltiples computadoras. Con la llegada de sistemas de múltiples núcleos, Erlang comenzó a aprovechar esta capacidad, aunque no fue hasta mediados de la década de |
A data table thousands of years old (2020) Published: 2024-12-21 | Origin: Hacker News The article discusses the historical use of data tables, particularly citing an ancient Mesopotamian clay tablet from around 3600 to 4000 years ago, discovered in Larsa, Iraq. This tablet, inscribed during the Old Babylonian Period, features a cuneiform text that has been transliterated and translated by Professor Eleanor Robson from University College London. The tablet likely contains records relating to payroll for a construction project, showcasing the organization of data into neat rows and columns—similar |
Vector embeddings, tokenization, and Vector databases Published: 2024-12-21 | Origin: /r/programming The content provides an overview of vector databases, which are designed to store and manipulate vector embeddings—numerical representations of data like text, images, or audio. These embeddings, generated by machine learning algorithms, are useful for applications such as similarity searches and recommendation systems. For example, a vector database can help recommend products based on image uploads. The concept of dimensional space is illustrated using an analogy of sorting fruits by characteristics such as size, sweetness, and color, where each fruit corresponds to a point in |
Dividing unsigned 8-bit numbers Published: 2024-12-21 | Origin: Hacker News The content discusses the complexity and latency associated with division operations in CPUs, specifically comparing the Cannon Lake and Zen4 architectures. It notes that 32-bit division latency ranges from 10 to 15 cycles for Cannon Lake and 9 to 14 cycles for Zen4, while 32-bit multiplication latency is consistently 3 to 4 cycles across both models. The text highlights that SIMD ISAs typically lack integer division support, with RISC-V being a notable exception, although they do support floating-point |
What is the Two Generals Problem in Distributed Systems? Published: 2024-12-21 | Origin: /r/programming The concept of network reliability in distributed systems is often misunderstood, particularly regarding message communication between nodes. In large-scale applications, it is common to assume that some messages may be lost due to various reasons such as power failures, node failures, or network congestion. To improve reliability, systems typically implement strategies to resend requests in case of errors or timeouts until acknowledgments are received, ensuring that messages reach their destination. The article illustrates these challenges through the Two Generals Problem, a thought experiment depicting two generals |
City Roads: A tool to draw all roads in a city at once Published: 2024-12-21 | Origin: Hacker News Of course! Please provide the content you'd like me to summarize, and I'll be happy to help. |
Rules to avoid common extended inline assembly mistakes Published: 2024-12-21 | Origin: /r/programming The article discusses the complexities and risks associated with using inline assembly in GCC and Clang, particularly highlighting its use in C and C++. It describes the asm keyword as akin to the "unsafe" keyword, as many tutorials—commonly misleading—often contain serious mistakes while still yielding expected results. The focus is on extended assembly, which involves constraints or clobbers, as opposed to basic assembly, which has fewer risks. The primary recommendation is to avoid inline assembly whenever possible, advocating for the |