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stevefan1999on MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta

MongoDB is a natural choice if you are working with denormalized deeply hierarchical data structure like JSON. It is also natural to JavaScript devs since the shell itself is JavaScript. This makes it super effective on modern web framework although I recently switched to Drizzle

stevefan1999on MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta

Citus on Postgres used to have similar feature; Dead after Microsoft acquisition

stevefan1999on The internet discovers TLA+. Now what?

I indirectly use TLA+ through https://github.com/quint-co/quint. I added instructions that "before you implement any feature, please use Quint to model it and make sure no counterexample for the system as a whole, reiterate the design with Quint as well and make sure your documents and implementation follows the formal model and docs".

The result, while takes much longer, is quite magical. A lot of transaction and atomic bugs were found and fixed just by having such simple instruction alone.

However, sometimes it is not all magical especially around external resources. Cloudflare, unfortunately, sometimes have hiccups on D1 and KV with timeout, which is more or less a force majeure.

Fortunately, that means I will have to model the action as a binary event, that the transaction may not complete as we would have thought guaranteed, and by add extra guard around it, so that the state would have to be retried.

I was able to workaround it like that so far. Keep in mind the more conditions and constraints, the beefier your CPU might need since it is on the scale of NP

stevefan1999on How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?

Intel has a cache-as-ram (CAR) mode / Non-Eviction Mode, which is what you wanted but it is only available before DRAM is brought up via core initialization. Not sure about AMD.

stevefan1999on Python Workers are now generally available

Indeed. I still remember deploying GAE apps with Java WAR and Python Django as a kid 13 years ago. Then Heroku and now fly.io and Render. For me I went Docker and Kubernetes. Back then GAE has a really good free tier, so I used it to deploy a HTTP proxy to bypass school network

stevefan1999on Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM

Gamma squeezed by the AI business, that's why. The more you add the fuel, the further it will pump up.

stevefan1999on San Francisco Onion Futures Company

> Let the free market reign supreme.

Tsk. There is no free market.

stevefan1999on Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing

GraphQL is not terribly bad to interact with. The schema system and field selection is really powerful that you can pick partial results, and that you can use an object oriented way to represent your domain models. It is pretty neat for cross-team collaboration.

Replacing GraphQL and REST + OpenAPI OTOH I think is much more terrible. You have two API description language (one on the URL path, maybe the Zod schema, another one on the OpenAPI schema). Things like tRPC or magic functions are just using Typescript type system and comment to replace the schema that GraphQL already has.

The only thing I would bitch about GraphQL is it is quite hard to build an ad-hoc GraphQL server from the first principle, while REST is really KISS till the end. And GraphQL typically needs a lot more attention to N+1 problem.

stevefan1999on Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3

Speaking as a Chinese myself and who contributed to JuiceFS before, yeah, the culture part, you're spot on...

stevefan1999on Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

I don't think this is a sarcasm, as a long standing Rust user myself, I don't think the community should preach out by "memory safety" -- rather the structural change in coding mindset and new ideas such as ADT and generic programming, while retaining mostly zero-cost like C++ without the bearing of C++ complexity (that includes a compiler that spits out 300 lines of compiler error just because I missed one <).

Memory safety is just what Rust inherited from C++ smart pointers with a stronger linear/affine type system twist, especially regarding move semantics, cloning and borrowing rules. What makes it powerful is the various language features it also incorporated from Cilk/C#/OCaml/Haskell.

Right now Rust and Zig is my two favourite middle ground. It is sad that Zig went completely sod-off-to-LLM mode but the most devastating aspect of Zig is that it is way too Linux focused. A lot of the code in Zig I cannot compile on Windows, plus the major changes to IO interface and the colorless function fiasco is really making me question the stability of Zig.

This recent event led me to displace Zig and replaced it with Nim, which emits C code instead and having a really powerful algebraic language system, while getting some benefits of Rust such as scoped smart pointer (I think they call it ORC), or using simple mark and sweep arena collector or even full-blown Boehm GC.

Right now I'm trying to create a distribution of Nim in a single binary (with musl and mingw packed together) and using tcc as the backend, all in a single binary with Rust and an internal project to convert wasm 3.0 and wasi proposal 1 modules into Rust code, which the Nim compiler and TCC are both compiled to WASIp1 first, then term-rewritten/transpiled to Rust (think w2c2 or wasm2c, but targets Rust, I found some nice structuralism of Rust and wasm lately)

stevefan1999on Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3

I use JuiceFS https://github.com/juicedata/juicefs if you think the Chinese are worth the trust

stevefan1999on Navier-Stokes Announcement

That is so vague you might as well call Windows NT new technologies

stevefan1999on JEP 544: Ahead-of-Time Code Compilation

Welcome to ngen and GAC, Java

stevefan1999on PlayStation cancels Kojima's PHYSINT, Xbox steps in

Back then gaming wasn't as big as it is today. It does make sense to have TLOU outsold MGS4, they have 5 years gap, it is more than a decade later for both games now. I think we need to talk about percentage impacts rather than absolute numbers.

stevefan1999on Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes

But to be honest, I wonder what is the smallest interpretable and practical Turing Complete VM? I would argue that implementing a brainfuck that we lower Python interpreter to, or even say like an interpreter untyped lambda calculus or SKI combinator would be very useful, especially for the hardware bootstrapping.

I'm talking about things like SectorLisp https://justine.lol/sectorlisp/

stevefan1999on ChatGPT outage – Resolved

> Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and learned to observe the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users.

Then the Internet grow explosion happens to a small communuity. Oh boy how do we know what kind of monster it is today.

stevefan1999on ChatGPT Is Throwing 404

You know who is not being invited...Gemini

stevefan1999on True Rate of Unemployment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Typo: it is Homoiconicity, not hominocity. I typed too fast

stevefan1999on JIT Compiling Code in 5μs

So what, are you willing to go away from von-neumann architecture where instructions are data and data are instructions, i.e. the instruction-data hominocity that underpins JIT compilation? Are you willing to go to a pseudo-Harvard architecture where the ability of JIT compiling is soft locked by other means like VM or strong code authentication or policy protection, which is what Apple is doing.

Fun fact: even Apple themselves have JIT. JavaScriptCore on iOS has JIT, it's just that the App Store policies forbid any application submissions with JIT or trying to mmap/mprotect an executable region. There used to be apps on TrollStore that runs JIT

stevefan1999on Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries

> There's the old and new C runtimes in MSVCRT.DLL

Some advertisement for VC-LTL: https://github.com/Chuyu-Team/VC-LTL5 and https://github.com/Chuyu-Team/YY-Thunks

VC-LTL Implements a good subset of modern CRT functions using the msvcrt.dll, which makes modern MSVC compiler to emit binaries that theoretically can run in Windows NT 4.1 or Windows 98 (until CFG broke them, but you can turn it off). Still can teach an old dog new tricks.

YY-Thunk is a little more funky, it tries to implement new Win32 userspace API for old system by emulating the behavior and expected values using userspace API in the old apartment, so you can try to implement a function in Windows 10 with functions in Windows Vista, and hopefully it will work out.

stevefan1999on Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries

The concept you mentioned is just dependency injection in software engineering design, but instead of giving a class and protocol/interface you give a bunch of function pointers, which is, well, some kind of interface anyway

stevefan1999on A SAT Attack on Tarski's High School Algebra Problem

I'm not sure, but maybe it is due to that the expression a - b can be replaced as a + (-b)?

Similarly, I think a * b and a / b can be replaced with the same trick, but then I realized it may not work on non-abelian, or where multiplicative inverse is not available...

stevefan1999on Yadda 3.0.0: BDD in the Age of AI Agents

Yep, I've been experimenting Playwright with CucumberJS and Deno for the last 3 months and it's super effective

stevefan1999on Intel wants to integrate DRAM with the CPU [video]

So uh, isn't it just L4 cache like 3D V-Cache or in Intel's own terminology, bLLC? I just don't see how they violated data hierarchy to be more useful

stevefan1999on Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word

This site, https://fabscene.com/ fascinates me even more

stevefan1999on Show HN: A tiny LLM running at 21,000 tok/s on a $250 FPGA (Live Demo)

That said, FPGA do provide a middle ground, but using it for speed and power efficient is not a forte, and the true value exactly comes from this focus alone: it allows you do emulate systhesis and verify that your logic is correct before you do full ASIC tapeout, e.g. building softcores for CPU validation

Anything else is added and unintentional benefits.

stevefan1999on Launch HN: Stoa Markets (YC S26) – A Marketplace for GPUs and AI Servers

vast.ai rents. this one sells

stevefan1999on Launch HN: Stoa Markets (YC S26) – A Marketplace for GPUs and AI Servers

But what about the GPUs that are considered defective for corporate and enterprise use, but perfect for personal use...say like A100s that maybe having ECC issues but I can live with that

stevefan1999on Itadakimasu: A word you say to the food, not the cook

語源は、食事の準備のために駆け回ることを意味する「馳走（ちそう）」という言葉にあります。そこに、敬意を表す接頭語の「ご」と接尾語の「様」が結びつき、「ご馳走様（ごちそうさま）」という表現になりました。現在では、食事を用意してくれた人や、ごちそうしてくれた人に対するお礼の言葉として広く使われています。

from https://jp.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/thank...