zbentley

14 ms·

241.
by zbentley 3mo ago
> the pipe is generally unidirectional So are most message queues. If the producer needs to know when the consumer has finished work, that's not a queue; that's an RPC.
242.
by zbentley 3mo ago
Bad take. Most of the different behaviors you criticize about message queue systems arise from them needing to a) distribute work b) durably, c) over the network. Most message queues want to be able to distribute work to multiple parallel c
243.
by zbentley 3mo ago
We call that “Larry Wall nomenclature”.
244.
by zbentley 3mo ago
s/some/most/ That's not meant to be snide, just true, I think.
245.
by zbentley 3mo ago
> rewrites are bad engineering, in most cases. I think this situation is a referendum on whether that is still true—or, if it is true, whether the proportions on “most” have changed significantly due to AI.
246.
by zbentley 3mo ago
Off topic, but watching the output of this thing renews my disappointment that so many programming languages/frameworks fail to provide signal sender information to signal handlers. It’s there! Crusty ABI and historical reasons are, as
247.
by zbentley 3mo ago
I’m not sure that suffices. If a site has a very “good” (at keeping people glued to the screen) content ranking algorithm, they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads. Longer engagement time by viewers = more ad impress
248.
by zbentley 3mo ago
Fair, though I think a large part of why this has always been more difficult than it should be is the fundamental design of TCP and IP. The former encodes notions of “roaming client” and “durable server” in ways incompatible with devices th
249.
by zbentley 3mo ago
My friend, you have reinvented something called a “purchase”.
250.
by zbentley 3mo ago
They really, really don’t. I’m sympathetic to the goal of moving manufacturing stateside, but fixing regulatory hurdles needs to happen first. Just because a foreign glove manufacturer has to comply with the same safety/quality standar
251.
by zbentley 3mo ago
Sure, but “shell scripts” as an (admittedly imprecise) term usually imply separate executable files, not shell libraries/functions that are sourced.
252.
by zbentley 3mo ago
Presumably you can call chdir(2) from the C code? Or did you mean change the directory of the calling shell (in which case, executable shell scripts written in Bash and friends can’t do that either).
253.
by zbentley 3mo ago
That’s a good clarification, thanks for writing it. I think you and the uncle post by bluefirebrand are both right: the social expectations are different enough now that there really might not be a practical alternative for most people to
254.
by zbentley 3mo ago
Eval differs very slightly from, say, an interpreter with a very non-syntactic AST, due as you say to homoiconicity. Neither read, print, nor loop differ in any Lisp-specific or qualitative way. And the differences in eval’s behavior don’t
255.
by zbentley 3mo ago
Slightly off topic, but it is worth being familiar with AWSCLI’s built in jmespath JSON transformation system. That saves on the need for jq in a lot of cases. Given that awscli bundles that, I generally forgive it for defaulting to JSON (e
256.
by zbentley 3mo ago
I wrote GGP as a Lisp user and enjoyer—not pretending to deep experience, but definitely am well acquainted. And neither the REPL nor live reloading are important differentiators. Neither is the ability to attach a REPL to a running program
257.
by zbentley 3mo ago
There are some truly powerful and unique things about Lisps, but I wish articles like this would stop including REPLs and hot-reloading. The former have been table stakes for interpreted languages (and some compiled ones!) for years, and th
258.
by zbentley 3mo ago
I interpret that the opposite way: if a huge spam campaign can be run by a guy in his bedroom, there’s no way that larger spam operators can be effectively killed by legal action. They’ll just employ different guys in different bedrooms. Th
259.
by zbentley 3mo ago
> Can you send mail from something that doesn't have a DNS entry? I hope not. Just like SSL, I think requiring a registrar+DNS server to vouch for a durable identity is an important barrier to abuse (and an important intervention po
260.
by zbentley 3mo ago
I don’t think they can. Spam, like speeding on highways and drug sales, is such an asymmetric enforcement area that I have very limited confidence that legal enforcement would make a significant dent in the volume. It’s far too technically
261.
by zbentley 3mo ago
OpenBSD’s equivalent is the hw.uuid sysctl: https://man.openbsd.org/sysctl.2#HW_UUID~2 Other BSDs don’t have that, but have equivalent PCI tree identifiers. “hostid”, too, is found on many systems but is much less unique as
262.
by zbentley 3mo ago
> why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations? Some do! https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
263.
by zbentley 3mo ago
The approach I originally described provides a useful early warning system for that condition. It’s not perfect, but has proven useful and better than nothing many times.
264.
by zbentley 3mo ago
Even if (a big ‘if’) that’s true, how is stock being destroyed? Investment returns maybe, but not supply.
265.
by zbentley 3mo ago
Firmly agree. I wish that ORMs provided two interfaces above raw SQL: a syntactically guaranteed-to-hit-indexes set of functions, and a do-anything set (e.g. MyModel.objects.unrestricted.filter(…)) that you could lint for and audit. An unsu
266.
by zbentley 3mo ago
> Wouldn't you consider defining the schema doing the domain modeling? No, because if the schema is the only reference for data models, developers on any sufficiently large team will come up with extremely widely varied queries to a
267.
by zbentley 3mo ago
PSI polling is also good, but there’s no substitute for knowing for sure that the OOM killer is awake and hunting.
268.
by zbentley 3mo ago
Yeah, crash ballast is an extremely underrated tool. It also works for the OOM killer: run a daemon with a child process that holds some fixed amount of memory. Adjust OOM scores of everything else on the system lower than the child. If the
269.
by zbentley 3mo ago
Sigh. Malloc failure should have had to be trapped with a signal or something, not just a return status. I know, I know, threads and nesting handlers make that hard and historical precedent makes it impossible to retrofit, but I can still d
270.
by zbentley 3mo ago
The issue is that there’s no generally correct behavior. Should a database under memory pressure stay up at all costs even if it becomes unusably slow (by e.g. nuking 99% of the buffer cache)? Or should it crash/failover hard with a li

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