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maxmcdon AI Guesses Your Accent

It might be a kindness to redact those emails before you can no longer edit your post.

maxmcdon Bandcamp Wrapped

Yes, you might want to paste it into your browser, for reasons...

maxmcdon Bandcamp Wrapped

More info here: https://macwright.com/2024/12/06/bandcamp-wrapped

maxmcdon 7 Databases in 7 Weeks for 2025

I think "source available" at this point: https://news.itsfoss.com/cockcroachdb-no-open-source/

maxmcdon 1B nested loop iterations

Another fave of mine by this person: https://benjdd.com/az/

maxmcdon Transactional Object Storage?

Yeah I think it's very interesting to compare the two. SlateDB expects a single writer and fences writes. This means you can make some serious savings on S3 costs because you're using S3 for consistency but you're batching writes.

GlassDB is much more accessible for smaller volume workloads, but gets very costly for high volume because of requests to S3 per-transaction. In-turn the consistency model is easier to reason about because the system is entirely stateless.

maxmcdon Contentlesshtml – An HTML page served entire in HTTP headers

I think if you go above 32kb for the size of all headers you'll start to see things breaking in various libraries and services.

maxmcdon The $5000 Compression Challenge (2001)

Is there any more information about this solution?

maxmcdon Web Locks API

ah! nice

maxmcdon Web Locks API

  class Lock {
    #release: () => void | undefined;
    constructor(public name: string) {}
    acquire() {
      if (this.#release !== undefined) throw new Error("Already locked");
      navigator.locks.request(this.name, async (lock) => {
        await new Promise<void>(resolve => {
          this.#release = resolve;
        });
      });
    }
    release() {
      if (this.#release === undefined) throw new Error("Not locked");
      this.#release();
    }
  }

maxmcdon Intentrace: Strace for Everyone

Huh, I did not realize I was settling for something so incomprehensible compared to this. Really nice to see. Maybe there are other nice tools like this?

maxmcdon Show HN: BemiDB – Postgres read replica optimized for analytics

Whoops, I forgot that tables maintained in the db are not the same as remote archives. :|

maxmcdon Show HN: BemiDB – Postgres read replica optimized for analytics

Using duckdb and apache iceberg means that you can run read replicas without any operational burden. Clickhouse is amazing, but they do not allow you to mount dumb read replicas to object storage (yet).

I can imagine this product is a very elegant solution for many types of companies/teams/workloads.

maxmcdon WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill

Yes, maybe they're talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_window_scale_option

maxmcdon WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill

Please explain?

maxmcdon Every boring problem found in eBPF (2022)

There is an explanation here: https://lwn.net/ml/all/20241105035101.GD41004@maniforge/

maxmcdon Build a serverless ACID database with this one neat trick (atomic PutIfAbsent)

I have also been thinking about this:

https://slatedb.io/ is new and KV on object storage. Maybe helpful.

There is lots of similar work over ipfs, I have not had the chance to experiment yet, but I'd like to see what a workflow is like with (eg): summa: https://github.com/izihawa/summa

I tried to implement trigram search on object storage using Zoekt: https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt, but I found that common queries load 30-40% of the entire index, so setting it up without some kind of caching strategy felt a little ridiculous.

maxmcdon Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

Hey, just curious. If you have no Cloud/LB/CDN how are you routing requests to datacenters? Anycast? DNS? Something else?

maxmcdon Fair: A Go library for serving resources fairly

In preemptive multitasking you are trying to get all the work done as quickly as possible, but with FAIR and similar systems you want to make sure that a single client/user/resource cannot steal an inordinate amount of capacity.

I do not think languages/runtimes typically implement that kind of prioritization/limiting mechanism.

maxmcdon gRPC: 5 Years Later, Is It Still Worth It?

Twirp is lovely, we kind of hit a wall when using it internally because it doesn't have a streaming story: https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp/issues/3

If you don't need to stream data it is excellent.

maxmcdon How we built Townie – an app that generates fullstack apps

There hasn’t been a ton of work in this area, but most things will work in Deno if you import them directly. You’d need to figure out blob storage and sqlite but I don’t think it would be the biggest lift to do so.

maxmcdon Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

afaik there are no residential loads in emergency response programs in Texas

ECRS is a program run by ERCOT, they trigger the battery discharge directly, or in some situations the resources might respond to an under-frequency relay.

maxmcdon Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

The 2 GW of ECRS capacity does include Demand Response resources that are reducing their load to provide the capacity.

I imagine the other ERCOT demand response programs were also dispatched.

maxmcdon Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

Agreed, see the index of those posts: https://research.swtch.com/vgo

Other contenders I find myself sharing and re-reading:

- https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

- https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html

- https://research.swtch.com/bisect

- https://research.swtch.com/zip

maxmcdon Why is spawning a new process in Node so slow?

Do you have a sense for why things were so much faster in Go and Rust if they are both using a single process? I have also been experimenting with napi-rs which uses https://nodejs.org/api/n-api.html and allows you to run Rust in threads alongside the Node process. Performance with that approach has been very good, so I have wondered about the within-process limitations.

maxmcdon Why is spawning a new process in Node so slow?

Both Go and Rust had CPU near 100% on all cores. Most of the Deno and Bun workloads were at around 80%, some of the slower Node benchmarks were around 40-60% and that increased over time, I think most of the fastest benchmarks were seeing very good CPU utilization across all runs.

Sorry, this is all from memory of just having `btop` open for some of the benchmarks. Maybe in a future post I will dig into CPU utlization more.

maxmcdon Why is spawning a new process in Node so slow?

Ah, I will add it to the post, an accidental omission. This was all on `Linux 6.8.0-35-generic`.

maxmcdon Why is spawning a new process in Node so slow?

Yes, apologies for the less than satisfying conclusion. I am planning a part 2 of this post where I hope to actually answer the question.

In the meantime the discussion on lobste.rs includes some lower-level speculation: https://lobste.rs/s/tr8ozm/why_is_spawning_new_process_node_...

maxmcdon Why is spawning a new process in Node so slow?

Thanks for noting it. It do indeed mix those two up all the time. Pushed a fix!

maxmcdon File.haus – Anonymously upload up to 300GB

Hmm, couldn't it be possible to encrypt the file contents in the browser and provide a download link with a secret key in it?

I wonder if this kind of service could be implemented without needing to trust the host at all?