shereadsthenews

13 ms·

91.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
It is a mischaracterization to say that C++ operator new is built on top of malloc. If your new is overridden by, say, tcmalloc, your program will never call malloc.
92.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
You must use mlock call if you want to guarantee that no later action can suffer a major page fault.
93.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
When a memory control group runs out of space the process allocating just gets unilaterally killed with no notification. ulimit instead makes brk or mmap return a failure code, which the application could attempt to handle.
94.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
Also just deadlocking. The kernel's behavior in the face of real memory pressure is actually quite poor. It's unsafe to run a Linux box out of memory.
95.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
What's wrong with the article is that malloc is not even a feature of Linux. There's mmap and brk, both of which have documented failure modes.
96.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
Attempting to catch allocation failures is the stupidest feature of C++ and the main reason that people turn off exceptions in that language.
97.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
Yes you now have a choice: you can have terrible video meetings over Zoom or whatever, or you can get a T-1 and some Tandbergs and have good ones.
98.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
Most of the Bay Area doesn’t have the built environment to support that. As I always say: transportation cannot solve land-use problems.
99.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
Video conferencing worked perfectly when it was still done over circuit-switched digital telco networks. It’s only the Internet that has botched things up.
100.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
More powerful engines are less reliable. Motorcycle makers get twice the specific power out of their engines compared to cars, but the engines won't last 100k miles or even 50k and they require frequent major maintenance. Car buyers ar
101.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
The article is very poorly written and contains several major errors. "As the electronic charge in the solar cells gets transformed into sunlight"? The original announcement is at [1]. One wonders if this kind of research is rele
102.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
Why do you download such apps?
103.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
There's been a teensy bit more details than that, e.g. [1]. If you think about exactly the file semantics that Bigtable would require (append, pread) that's exactly what is provided. Note that Colossus and D are two separate thin
104.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
That’s how you design at this scale: keep it simple, don’t be a jackass. If the result looks complicated from the outside, you blew it.
105.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
The competitive nature of Googlers is what make Google a very fun place to work.
106.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
Yeah the whole time I was there every time I had to use bigtable or Spanner I always muttered to myself “I wish I could be using some free software garbage instead of this proprietary Google stuff right now.” Every Googler secretly yearns f
107.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
I don’t have the inside knowledge of this outage but there are some details in here. They say that the job got descheduled due to misconfiguration. This implies the job could have been configured to serve through the maintenance event. It a
108.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
Sure the TIOBE Index is flawed. I wouldn't have even mentioned it but it forms the basis of his argument.
109.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
It absolutely does and macOS has already broken it several times. This I guess to some extent demonstrates the folly of having one. https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-to-get-civ4-bts-w...
110.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
He does dismiss it right there in the same sentence, saying "I’m dubious about [12%] as well." It's obvious that this guy who equates $400 with a new tire is out of touch and I guess he drives a Porsche. Poor Americans drive
111.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
Indeed, speculative loads from pages that you don't even own has been a big big topic on this site for over a year. There's no respect for page boundaries in the hardware.
112.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
Civ IV will never work again. RIP.
113.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
Huh? Spatial locality knows no bounds. The hardware might not automatically prefetch across page boundaries but the application can initiate the fetches itself.
114.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
I like how he casually asserts that most of "us" don't program in C even though C and C++ are the #2 and #3 languages in the TIOBE Index today, after Java. It's fifty times more popular than Rust or whatever trend he thi
115.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
I don’t know about relative quality but Syzkaller finds a new kernel bug every minute or two and Coverity says there are thousands of unfixed defects that their static analysis can detect.
116.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
In practice it is easier to have same-sized experiment and control deployments than it is to normalize all the stats on a per-instance or per-request basis. I get more signal out of having identical populations than I have ever been able to
117.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
Considering the astonishing density of defects in Linux we can treat its author’s advice on software development as anti-advice.
118.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
The interesting tidbit in here (really the only piece of information at all) is that the outage itself prevented remediation of the outage. That indicates that they might have somehow hosed their DSCP markings such that all traffic was undi
119.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
That's not true. Configuration is just another input to a system and the outputs can be checked. There is nothing difficult about testing configs that is not already difficult about testing code.
120.
by shereadsthenews 7y ago
The amazing thing is how many times they've had this exact outage or a close relative of it and Ben Treynor still gets to keep his job.

More ›