ZGateway: Learnings from Putting a Proxy in Front of ZippyDB

Facebook Code · engineering.fb.com · 14 min

Software engineering · First personZippyDB · database proxy · request batching

Meta interposes a stateless proxy tier in front of its ZippyDB key-value store, collapsing an unbounded many-to-many TLS mesh across a million clients into a 19-fold reduction in persistent connections. Handling over one billion operations per second at roughly six percent computational overhead, the system batches and coalesces requests across unrelated callers while isolating overloaded tenants with discriminant load shedding.

Hacker News: 2 points · 0 comments

What If There Is No Master Plan for Your Life?

Kira Homsher · Electric Literature · electricliterature.com · 26 min

Culture & arts · First personmemoir essay · dog surgery recovery · searching for signs

Nursing an injured dog through a Cincinnati winter, Kira Homsher links her writing students' AI-generated essays, an ill-fated trip to Iceland, and a friend's unbacked-up hard drive crash. Drawing on early modern literature, she reclaims ambivalence as a capacity to resist linear progress narratives and hold contradictory feelings at once. This excerpt explores the quiet relief of navigating the world without clear signs.

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Andrei Lepikhov: Why is numeric so popular in PostgreSQL databases?

Planet PostgreSQL · postgr.es · 21 min

Software engineering · AnalysisPostgreSQL numeric · exact decimal types · database internals

A DBMS developer investigates whether database engines can replace slow decimal types with integers or floats, examining SQL specifications, tax statutes, and interchange formats. Statutory rules never mandate specific types, but strict mandates—such as rounding up at exactly half a cent—disqualify binary floating point. Interchange standards like ISO 20022 require decimal strings, while card networks transmit raw integers paired with external currency scales. (Excerpt.)

navigator.berlin: specced, not coded

svelte-meetup.schmidbauer.dev · tyler's Top Finds on Scour Today · svelte-meetup.schmidbauer.dev · 22 min

Internet & web · First personnavigator.berlin · SvelteKit · open data

Matze Schmidbauer dissects the friction of navigating Berlin's civic records, where uncovering basic infrastructure requires WFS queries for 16,217 climate polygons and OverpassQL searches for 960 volunteer-mapped tram stops. Confronting fractured official portals and state election results hosted on federal servers, he outlines a project aggregating disconnected urban layers into a unified address map. (Excerpt.)

You Should be Using Rootless Containers

Miguel Grinberg · miguelgrinberg.com · blog.miguelgrinberg.com · 8 min

Software engineering · How-torootless containers · Podman · Docker socket security

Adding an unprivileged user to the Linux Docker group enables instant passwordless privilege escalation by mounting the host root filesystem into a container. Switching to Podman eliminates this attack surface by running daemonless within user space. Transparent migration requires minor workflow adjustments, including using systemd Quadlets for reboot persistence and explicitly specifying fully qualified registry URLs for image pulls.

Python sets and dictionaries can have quadratic-time performance

lemire.me via hoistbypetard · Lobsters · lemire.me · 5 min

Software engineering · AnalysisPython dict · hash table collisions · CPU cache effects

Carefully chosen integer multiples of (2^61 - 1) trigger intentional hash collisions that force set construction to scale quadratically, reaching 45 seconds for 100,000 elements on an Apple M4 Max. Beyond pathological hashing, memory hierarchies also break constant-time expectations: standard lookups slow tenfold to 202 nanoseconds per key across large maps due to cache misses that compact alternatives avoid.

Hacker News: 99 points · 55 commentsLobsters: 1 points · 0 commentsComments

A reasonably practical guide to validating RFC 9421 HTTP Signatures for ActivityPub in PHP

@edent · shkspr.mobi · 5 min

Internet & web · How-toRFC 9421 · HTTP Signatures · ActivityPub

Parsing modern Mastodon payloads requires verifying RFC 9421 HTTP message signatures against dynamic header parameters and body digests. A practical PHP implementation walks through matching the SHA-256 `content-digest` hash, fetching public keys from the actor's `keyid` document, and reconstructing the exact newline-delimited signature base. The resulting routine passes the assembled string directly into `openssl_verify()`, accommodating Fediverse formatting assumptions.

Hacker News: 2 points · 0 commentsComments

The most detailed brain wiring diagram yet: How 166,000 neurons govern the fruit fly’s behavior

EL PAÍS English · tyler's Top Finds on Scour Today · english.elpais.com · 8 min

Science & space · ReportedDrosophila connectome · FIB-SEM · sex-specific circuits

Researchers at HHMI Janelia map the complete 166,000-neuron central nervous system of the fruit fly, combining focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy with machine learning and forty-four person-years of manual proofreading. Published across four Cell papers, the connectome reveals that sex-specific courtship behaviors stem from gene-driven wiring differences inside higher-order decision centers rather than peripheral sensory inputs.

Envy at the Ballot Box

Kristen French · Nautilus · nautil.us · 7 min

Science & space · Analysisvoting behavior · envy experiment · majority rule

Experimental games conducted at Sweden's Linköping University show that collective decision-making fosters resentment over unequal windfalls. When deciding by majority rule, 68 percent of participants opt to prevent an anonymous peer from receiving extra cash, compared to 57 percent choosing alone. A random-dictator condition confirms that majority rule itself, rather than mere group presence, drives this willingness to burn another person's potential gains.

Deadly Livestock Virus Found Lurking in Ancient Texts

Jake Currie · Nautilus · nautil.us · 2 min

Science & space · Reportedsheeppox virus · medieval parchment DNA · viral evolution

Agricultural researchers extract sheeppox virus DNA from medieval parchment manuscripts, including the thousand-year-old York Gospels, identifying cross-species infections preserved on calf, goat, and sheep skins. Genomic comparisons with Bronze Age sheep teeth and modern strains trace the pathogen's divergence to the rise of animal domestication between 11,500 and 3,700 years ago, revealing a genome that remained remarkably stable for millennia.

Hey AI, Can You Just Give Me a Hat Tip Please?

All - O'Reilly Media · oreilly.com · 17 min

AI & ML · AnalysisAI attribution · TracIn · author compensation

Awaiting a copyright settlement check from Anthropic for pirated training books, Andrew Stellman argues that creators need causal attribution rather than cash or surface citations. Testing the problem directly, he builds a 37,000-parameter model to compare gradient-tracing approximations against ground-truth retraining, successfully isolating the true training source on a trick prompt where resemblance-based heuristics fail. (Excerpt.)

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Andy Simpkins: A quick experiment with vibe coding

Planet Debian · blog.koipond.org.uk · 6 min

AI & ML · First personvibe coding · bash scripting · AI regression debugging

A six-hour attempt to write a Bash DHCP parser with an AI assistant deteriorates into constant regressions, broken subshell scoping, and reintroduced bugs. Because large language models rely on statistical averaging rather than syntax execution, localized fixes repeatedly break surrounding architecture. Avoiding this cycle requires treating the tool like an amnesic junior developer by anchoring explicit constraints and enforcing strict shell error handling.

Hacker News: 2 points · 0 comments

In an Age of AI, a Physicist Seeks What Endures

Rebecca Boyle · Quanta Magazine · quantamagazine.org · 10 min

AI & ML · ReportedAI policy in physics · LLMs and intellectual property · Sarah Demers

Yale physics chair Sarah Demers deploys AI to optimize magnetic fields for Fermilab’s Mu2e experiment, yet has never typed into Claude or ChatGPT. Speaking in an excerpted interview as she co-authors the American Physical Society’s AI policy, Demers warns that uncredited training data creates a moral hazard, while frictionless answers risk depriving junior researchers of the vulnerability essential to learning.

Hacker News: 3 points · 0 commentsComments

Neuroqueering on the lawn

Siobhan Unwin & Kathryne Ford · Aeon · aeon.co · 15 min

Culture & arts · Analysisneurodivergence · Charles Dickens · Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen’s 1857 weeping collapse at Charles Dickens’s country estate shatters his host’s carefully manicured Victorian domestic propriety. Paired with the grotesque 1980s club performances of Leigh Bowery, the episode illustrates “neuroqueer excess”—moments where uncontainable feeling defies rigid scripts of disciplined masculinity and public composure. The essay, excerpted here, argues that such overflows threaten societies demanding that intense emotion remain invisible.

The View-Master was built for photographers, not children, and nobody told us

Dale Baskin · Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) · dpreview.com · 7 min

History · AnalysisView-Master history · stereoscopic photography · Kodachrome

Before its 1950s repositioning as a children's toy, the View-Master begins as a photographic tool designed to rival scenic postcards with mounted Kodachrome film chips. The format quickly secures a 100,000-unit military training contract and later expands into a dedicated 1952 camera system that lets photographers shoot and mount their own 69-pair stereo reels.

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The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Jon Ronson

Longreads · longreads.com · 6 min

Books & writing · First personJon Ronson · narrative nonfiction · writing process

Jon Ronson unpacks the mechanics of his propulsive narrative nonfiction, explaining that his storytelling instincts function only when gathering material in the field rather than from imagination. Alongside notes on his book The Castle, he details editing audio himself in Descript, wandering Reddit to break creative blocks, and listening to Bill Bryson on continuous loop to fall asleep.

MBTA Reveals Its Plans For ‘Phase 1’ of New Widett Circle Rail Yard

Christian MilNeil · Streetsblog Massachusetts · mass.streetsblog.org · 3 min

Boston & New England · ReportedMBTA · Widett Circle · electrified rail fleet

The MBTA plans to begin construction in March at its 24-acre Widett Circle site in South Boston, adding fill against sea-level rise and building six catenary-equipped layover tracks. Each track can store nine-car trainsets to support incoming battery-electric fleets on the Fairmount and Providence lines. Two subsequent phases adding twelve more tracks and an inspection pit currently lack state funding.

MIT Professor Dies of Injuries Sustained In Previously Unreported Crash On Memorial Drive

Streetsblog Massachusetts · mass.streetsblog.org · 2 min

Boston & New England · Reportedbicycle crash reporting · MIT · Memorial Drive safety

Ancient metallurgy researcher Thomas Rose has succumbed to injuries following an August bicycle collision near the Massachusetts Avenue bridge. Because Memorial Drive falls under Massachusetts State Police jurisdiction rather than municipal control, official details remain undisclosed by state prosecutors. Cambridge advocates identify Rose as the fifth pedestrian or cyclist killed along the corridor since 2014, renewing petitions for permanent state-level safety overhauls.

The bizarre spirit of classic Elder Scrolls games is alive and well in little lo-fi RPG A Short Quest

PC Gamer · pcgamer.com · 5 min

Games · First personA Short Quest · Elder Scrolls · lo-fi indie RPG

Silent Moon’s playtest for A Short Quest abandons quest logs and map markers to revive the eccentric, unguided feel of Morrowind. Players dance for blueberry-granting ponds, block attacks with pocket rocks, and manage physical inventory where gold and scattered bones take up real space. Combat balances deliberate stamina management against slapstick ragdoll physics in an intentionally small-scale world.

Frédéric Splendore Sets Men’s Supported Via Alpina FKT

Sarah Brady · iRunFar.com · 5 min

Outdoors & lifestyle · ReportedVia Alpina FKT · Frédéric Splendore · trail running

Averaging more than 85 kilometers daily, Frédéric Splendore traverses the 2,000-kilometer Via Alpina route across eight countries in 23 days, 11 hours, and 42 minutes. His crossing covers 103,600 meters of elevation gain, cutting more than twelve days off the prior men's benchmark and five off the overall record. The effort serves as the opening leg of an ongoing charity crossing to Ukraine.

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A Split Keyboard Designed for Human Hands

Bryan Cockfield · Hackaday · hackaday.com · 2 min

Hardware · Reportedsplit keyboard · ergonomics · 36-key layout

Through roughly fifty iterations, Paul rethinks typing hardware to align with finger anatomy rather than nineteenth-century typewriter constraints. Low-profile switches sit in custom-spaced columns, raising ring keys and angling index columns inward. Three-key thumb clusters handle layers and spacing to condense the split build down to 36 keys.

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Sorting out a DNF "transaction failed" during my upgrade to Fedora 44

cks · Chris's Wiki :: blog · utcc.utoronto.ca · 5 min

Software engineering · First personFedora 44 upgrade · DNF transaction failure · RPM scriptlet debugging

A live desktop upgrade from Fedora 43 to 44 trips an opaque RPM transaction failure during post-transaction scripts, despite all 14,340 packages installing cleanly. Reviewing terminal session logs captured with script reveals a red-herring systemd error and an overlooked scriptlet failure in the pax package. The system survives fully upgraded, though DNF subsequently marks every package's repository origin as '<unknown>'.

.name Termination

pavel_lishin · Hacker News: Best · neil.fraser.name · 3 min

Internet & web · First person.name TLD · ICANN Verisign policy · personal domain identity

ICANN approves Verisign’s proposal to eliminate the third level of the `.name` domain hierarchy, voiding addresses prepaid through 2040 to simplify registry administration. Longtime registrant Neil Fraser details how the purge threatens 22,000 domain owners with bricked IoT devices, lost email accounts, and hijacking risks if newly vacated second-level domains are claimed by others.

Hacker News: 1798 points · 449 commentsComments

Mothlamp problems

Bauke · ~comp - Tildes · unfoldingdiagrams.leaflet.pub · 2 min

Software engineering · First personcreative ambition · side projects · programming languages

Engineers routinely surrender years to alluring, intractable projects of questionable utility, from custom build systems and structural editors to bespoke programming languages. Reflecting on a half-decade spent building an extensible static analysis tool alongside a GitHub account littered with abandoned parsers, a programmer defends these dead ends as essential exercise for dreaming big, learning from each unfinished build before time runs out.

Hacker News: 5 points · 1 comments