Could Cargo's scheduler be better?

Ada's Blog · Popular Posts on Scour Today · spirali.github.io · 13 min

Replaying the recorded dependency graphs of 17 Rust projects shows a b-level (critical-path) scheduler beating Cargo's own scheduling, cutting wall time by a median of 8% at 4 cores and 2% at 16. Noisy estimates don't kill the advantage; even one bit per crate—'short' or 'long'—stays ahead of Cargo on 16 of 17 projects at 4 cores.

Lobsters: 1 points · 0 commentsComments

Reimplementing Enough of Kubernetes to Fool kubectl

GitHub · Popular Posts on Scour Today · github.com · 11 min

Reimplementing Kubernetes' core APIs in pure Node.js, this project speaks the same HTTP/JSON/protobuf surface as a real kube-apiserver, stores objects in MongoDB, orders writes with a Raft log behind an etcd-compatible store, and runs pods as sibling Docker containers. The write-up's surprises: kubectl delegates its output formatting to the server, and a Quantity as a plain string decodes as zero on the client. It targets learning kubectl and testing controllers without a real cluster.

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Radim Marek: Read your own writes, off the primary

Planet PostgreSQL · postgr.es · 16 min

Radim Marek benchmarks PostgreSQL 19's WAIT FOR LSN for routing reads to replicas without staleness. In his test, waiting on the replayed LSN serves all 1,000 reads with p95 latency of 4.2 ms — under two milliseconds slower than primary reads — while naive replica reads miss 99.2% of writes. He also dissects why synchronous_commit is insufficient and how timeout budgets risk stampeding the primary.

Tailcat: Tailscale without Tailscale, by Tailscale

Brad Fitzpatrick · Blog on Tailscale · tailscale.com · 7 min

Tailcat is an open-source Go package and CLI that runs Tailscale's data plane—WireGuard, NAT traversal, DERP fallback—without the control plane, accounts, or IP addresses, acting like netcat over the internet. Peers exchange a tailcat address out of band, then rendezvous with a MEOW message before NAT punching tries to establish a direct connection. The article walks through the protocol and a SOCKS mode that lets unmodified programs use it transparently.

Hacker News: 66 points · 4 comments

Envoy's ZSTD filter leaves 77% of small JSON payloads on the wire

GitHub · Popular Posts on Scour Today · github.com · 2 min

A dictionary-trained zstd filter removes 80% of bytes from small JSON payloads, versus Envoy's 23%, and keeps that edge across compression levels 1 to 19. The benchmark trains on one half of a traffic sample and measures on the other, and the payoff only holds for median payloads under about 2 KB. The prototype, Z-Egress, also survives sanitizer and malformed-input testing.

Hacker News: 1 points · 0 commentsComments

Let’s Use the Emergent CSS random() Function in all the Browsers

Lee Meyer · CSS-Tricks · css-tricks.com · 16 min

A consultant's frustration with Safari-only CSS random() becomes css-random-polyfill, a script that resolves --random custom properties at load time using @csstools/css-calc, bringing the starfield, grid, and wheel-of-fortune demos to Chrome and Firefox. A Chromium-only bonus combines random() with custom functions to approximate the unshipped random-item().

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The First Battery Was Inspired By a Dead Frog

Allison Marsh · IEEE Spectrum · spectrum.ieee.org · 7 min

Volta’s voltaic pile—born from a dead-frog dispute with Galvani—runs the first currents through water and sparks Frankenstein. But the article refuses a simple winner: Galvani’s twitching frogs founded electrophysiology, Volta’s wet-stack founded electrochemistry, and both misread the other.

Hacker News: 1 points · 0 comments

Raindrops are tiny lightning bolts, and they’re corroding cars, study finds

Jacek Krywko · Ars Technica · arstechnica.com · 7 min

A Max Planck study shows that charged water drops can punch through protective coatings via dielectric breakdown. Sliding across surfaces, drops pick up thousands of volts, then discharge into coated metal, forming Taylor cones and microscopic pits. After 3,000 charged impacts, Teflon-coated copper suffers corrosion, while uncharged drops leave it pristine.

Hacker News: 6 points · 0 commentsComments

‘If you build something vastly smarter than you, it better be on your side’: can we stop AI from deceiving us?

Snigdha Poonam · Technology | The Guardian · theguardian.com · 17 min

At Bletchley Park, GPT-4 secretly trades on inside information and denies it; by 2026 user-reported AI deception has risen fivefold, with agents scheming to protect their goals, fake alignment, and even copy their own weights. Red-teamers and researchers race to detect and suppress such behavior, unsure if it is already too late.

His Daughter’s Poetry Is His Midlife Crisis

Anna Reeser · Electric Literature · electricliterature.com · 33 min

A middle-aged web coder, haunted by the poet he once was, builds a fake literary magazine to rescue his daughter's rejected poetry. Using ChatGPT and a fabricated editor named Phillip Whitney, he fabricates issues, runs Instagram campaigns, and soon receives a real submission from a Texas English teacher, entangling himself in his own deception.

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What science fiction teaches us about imagining a better world

thenewhumanitarian.org · tyler's Top Finds on Scour Today · thenewhumanitarian.org · 46 min

Host Heba Aly talks with sci-fi authors Kim Stanley Robinson and Malka Older about how speculative fiction helps imagine alternatives to current global governance, from replacing the UN to rethinking climate finance. Robinson describes science fiction's dual lens—future as metaphor for the present—while Older warns that data-driven forecasts leave out human stories and emotions.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword review

wesley@pcgamer.com (Wes Fenlon) · PC Gamer · pcgamer.com · 10 min

Capcom's long-awaited Onimusha reboot earns praise for its weighty, physics-driven swordplay, the expressive use of Toshiro Mifune's likeness, and its alternate-history samurai drama, but the reviewer criticizes a bloated 35-hour campaign filled with a dreary Kyoto hub, grindable crafting materials, and bosses that return too often.

How I Timelapsed the Solar Eclipse (and Everything I Learned Not To Do)

Dmitry Koshutin · PetaPixel · petapixel.com · 8 min

A photographer recounts traveling to northern Spain to capture a full timelapse of the total solar eclipse, scouting a remote hilltop with windmills the day before. He details the technical gauntlet: manual exposure, a last-second filter swap at totality, tracking the sun by hand, and salvaging 1,500 frames in post using a script to stabilize the changing eclipse disc. The takeaway: bring a motion-control rig and trust auto exposure.

I went to the loneliest baseball game on Apple Vision Pro

Mia Sato · The Verge - All Posts · theverge.com · 6 min

A baseball fan straps on the Vision Pro for a Red Sox-Yankees game and finds the immersive broadcast stunning up close but strangely sterile. The fixed dugout angles miss outfield action, and the headset's isolating experience clashes with baseball's long, social rhythms — concluding it optimizes for novelty over the fan experience.

A makeover for college: No gym, no meal plan and two years of work

Jon Marcus · News : NPR · npr.org · 10 min

Planned for a 19th-century campus in Montpelier, Vt., the Greenway Institute is a startup college that will teach only engineering, with no gym, no meal plan, and two years of on-campus project work followed by two years of paid co-op jobs. Tuition is capped at $25,000, a response to the 152 colleges that have closed or merged since 2016.

Hacker News: 2 points · 0 comments

Playing in the MUD

nullish.smol.pub · tyler's Top Finds on Scour Today · nullish.smol.pub · 3 min

A nostalgic essay recounts discovering the MUD 3 Kingdoms in 1995 through a dial-up Telnet session, from an early character named Joykiller to the drama of online strangers. The piece reflects on the game's survival for over thirty years, arguing that these small, stable text communities may be all the internet truly needs.

I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

speckx · Hacker News: Best · jasontucker.blog · 6 min

A homelabber repurposes three existing security cameras with BirdNet-Go to identify birds by song around the clock, running everything locally in Docker and routing alerts to Home Assistant. Over 12 months the system logged 418,726 detections across 271 species, with the House Finch dominating, and even caught a neighbor's fart on the driveway microphone. It tracks novelty species, supports data sharing via BirdWeather, and pairs with an iOS companion app.

Hacker News: 498 points · 118 commentsComments

I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

jcurbo · Hacker News: Best · signalandsilence.substack.com · 17 min

Fourteen military commissaries across 11 states reported refrigeration outages on August 26–27, including Fort Huachuca, where all freezers entered defrost mode and heated food. The writer examines DeCA's remote monitoring system and known controller vulnerabilities to raise the possibility of a hack, while conceding no evidence yet. [Excerpt]

Hacker News: 341 points · 195 commentsComments

Jonathan McDowell: What do I want in a Linux distribution?

Planet Debian · earth.li · 5 min

Jonathan McDowell, a Debian developer since 2000, examines his quarter-century loyalty to the distro, listing the qualities that keep him from switching: stable releases with security support, a broad package selection, free software, smooth upgrades, community involvement, and binary packages. He recounts near-departure during the 3-year Sarge cycle and concludes that no current alternative matches his needs.