Hacker News Reader

gmokkion Removing fsync from our local storage engine

Have you tried terminating the EC2 instances abruptly to test the resilience of your solution?

aws ec2 stop-instances \ --instance-ids i-12345678 \ --skip-os-shutdown

gmokkion Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine

Not in EU anymore

gmokkion US – Iran negotiations end with no deal reached

The negotiatons can be considered a big success because Israeli leaders did not order the murder of the negotiators this time. This will open doors for more realistic negotiations in the future.

gmokkion AWS engineer reports PostgreSQL perf halved by Linux 7.0, fix may not be easy

Java can work with transparent hugepages (in addition to preallocated hugepages), but you just use +AlwaysPreTouch to map them in during the startup so that at runtime there won't be any delays or jitter. Redis should add a similar option

gmokkion Evacuation of U.S. troops from Mideast base sends community groups scrambling

World economy will be better off with the 1-2% fee ($2M per tanker) that Iran asks if USofA leaves middle east, compared to the Trump 100% price hike on oil.

gmokkion Another Starlink satellite has inexplicably exploded

What options are there?

1. Manufacturing defects in satellites. Either accidental or sabotage.

2. Someone using them for target practice. With an energy beam or projectiles?

Did both of the satellites happen to be over the same region of earth?

gmokkion Revisiting Time: UT1, UTC, NTP and NTS

I would recommend using PTP on all clouds. The accuracy is more than 10x to NTP. It consumes less CPU. It does not use network traffic and thus can not be attacked, even if UDP is open to internet or if network stack is under DoS.

All clouds except AWS is easy: just `modprobe ptp_kvm` and point chrony at /dev/ptp0

On AWS it depends on instance type: some older do not support it at all, some support it via the network driver, some via the kvm PTP driver.

gmokkion Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues

When I pull the trigger and the bullet kills an another person, it is just how technology works. Why would I be responsible if I choose to use it or not?

gmokkion GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code

https://www.phoronix.com/news/SDL-Lands-Wayland-Pointer-Warp

Wayland and SDL got support this summer.

And Xwayland has had support for past 10 years: https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Pointer-Confinement

gmokkion Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres

Don't you always need a database after reading events from Kafka to deduplication?

So the competing solutions are: PostgreSQL or Kafka+PostgreSQL

Kafka does provide some extrs there, handling load spikes, more clients that PG can handle natively and resilience to some DB downtime. But is it worth the complexity, in most cases no.

gmokkion Key IOCs for Pegasus and Predator Spyware Removed with iOS 26 Update

I think he was trying to say that phone theft can benefit the same way as credit card theft. The thief uses the phone to buy stuff before the user reports it stolen. In this case the stuff that is bought is mobile services that are billed for example 100€ for each SMS message. The victims mobile subscription plan gets the bill and the associates of the thief get the money.

gmokkion Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

I have bookmarked the play store update view as separate icon by long pressing the play store icon, then long pressing/dragging the my apps section to an own "app".

That way I can skip the store garbage and directly go click update all apps button.

I just tried on apple device s few weeks ago and it took me many minutes to find the listing where I can update installed apps and it was missing the update all button...

gmokkion Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)

If there is no sprained ankle diagnostics and doctors just tell you to ignore not being well: just jump and run around as normal there is nothing seriously wrong.

And doctors only react when you can no longer use your legs for a year, otherwise they must be amputated.

Or would you rather have an earlier disgnostic with instructions to reduce extreme loads and try to take it easy. Let's check again in a week.

gmokkion Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) is reshaping microservice placement

I've used https://instaguide.io/info.html?type=c5a.24xlarge#tab=lstopo

to browse the info. It is getting a bit old though.

gmokkion The future of large files in Git is Git

I've been thinking of using git filter to split the huge asset files (that are just internally a collection of assets bundler to 200M-1GB files) into smaller ones. That way when artist modifies one sub-asset in a huge file only the small change is recorded in history. There is an example filter for doing this with zip files.

The above should work. But does git support multiple filters for a file? For example first the above asset split filter and then store the files in LFS which is another filter.

gmokkion You're Wrong About Dates – and Your Code Is Lying to You

There are occasionally 61 seconds in a minute when they insert leap seconds - or did they stop that to avoid crashing millions of computer systems?

gmokkion Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords

Same has been happening for for a few months. I get thrown out of all o365 services multiple times each day.

gmokkion Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

The gas station is supposed to release the authorization after the real payment clears when you stop the pump. So they should not pile up even if you do many visits in short period of time.

In Finland the has pump firsts ask you to choose how big an authorization you want to do when you enter your card to the slot. It will not allow you to pump more than that and the authorization is then replaced by real charge before you enter you car.

gmokkion Preliminary report into Air India crash released

I would assume that the engines cur of due to fault in the shared control system. And to restore power the pilots toggled the switches to off and then back on to get them running again.

Hopefully the timestamps tell if the engines lost power before switches were turned off? Or is there some time window that was not recorded due to the lost power to systems?

gmokkion Speeding up PostgreSQL dump/restore snapshots

Why would btrfs or btrfs snapshot require single disks? My btrfs is combination of different size disks bought over time (3T to 24T) and snapshots works just fine. I've configured it to use raid with 2 copies for data and 3 for metadata.

gmokkion Fun with Futex

Doesn't the futex2 syscall allow 1 byte futexes on recent kernel?

Double checks. Nope. The api is there and the patch to implement them has been posted multiple times: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20241025093944.707639534@infrad...

But the small futex2 patch will not go forward until some users say they want/need the feature

gmokkion Waiting for Postgres 18: Accelerating Disk Reads with Asynchronous I/O

I would initially add it for WAL writes and reads. There should never be another read in normal operation.

gmokkion India launches attack on 9 sites in Pakistan and Pakistani Jammu and Kashmir

I don't think there were western armaments in Ukraine even though Russia invaded Ukraine over ten years ago and they have been fighting ever since. In the second phase of the invasion both sides still used old Soviet equipment until West finally decided that sanctions are not enough to stop Putin

gmokkion Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads

Wouldn't it be fairer to remove the lowest tax bracket, or move all tax brackets higher?

gmokkion Internationalization-puzzles: Daily programming puzzles just like Advent of Code

SMS in Europe was max 140 bytes and they had various custom 7bit encodings for most western languages. SMS also supported ucs-2 aka Unicode with fixed 16bit codepoints which cannot do modern emojis, but all normal languages can be shown, whether your phone has/had the fonts was another matter.

And when concatenating the SMS messages the UserDatHhader had to be added taking minimum 6 bytes, thus reducing the bytes available from 140 to 134 bytes, which allows only 153 or 67 characters for each 7bit or unicode SMS messages respectively.

gmokkion US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s

Technically you are correct. But actually the real winners were the extreme vote suppression tactics. Without them trump would have lost clearly: read the extremely conservative estimates targeted mostly non-trump voters: https://hartmannreport.com/p/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won...

gmokkion There isn't much point to HTTP/2 past the load balancer

I would not use http/3 for lan. Even the latest Linux kernels struggle with it. Http/1 aka TCP has fully supported encryption and other offload support. UDP consumes still much more CPU for same amount of traffic.

gmokkion I helped fix sleep-wake hangs on Linux with AMD GPUs

Has anyone tried the AMD suspend/resume patches that Alibaba? https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2025-January/...

"We have tried to solve these issues case by case, but found that may not be the right way. Especially about the unbalanced irq reference count, there will be new issues appear once we fixed the current known issues. After analyzing related source code, we found that there may be some fundamental implementation flaws behind these resource tracking issues.

So we try to fix those issues by two enhancements/refinements to current device management state machines."

gmokkion Allocator Hints for Btrfs

Didn't ZFS also have disk corruption on Linux last year?

And a few years before that Ubuntu backports had Ubuntu specific ZFS corruption.

Basically the old truth still holds with checksummed filesystems too: raid is not backup

gmokkion Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

Do you mean location as in different subsystem than dma, which is required for all modern devices. Or just location as in stash the files outside the dma directory?