1. Prolog language for PostgreSQL proof of concept
Total comment counts : 13
Summary
The article discusses the importance of feedback and states that it is taken seriously by the writer. It also mentions the PostgreSQL Prolog language handler.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author shares their positive experience with Prolog, describing a project they worked on in the 1980s. They built a prototype of an air/land battle simulator using Common Lisp and later rewrote it in ExperProlog on a Mac. The Prolog version was completed in just ten days and included graphics and UI extensions that the Common Lisp version did not have. The author notes that this project was one of the few large projects they ever did in Prolog.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article recommends checking out Logica, a datalog-like language specifically designed to compile into SQL queries. You can find more information about Logica at logica.dev.
2. Santa Barbara’s collective memory, sold for kindling
Total comment counts : 14
Summary
The article discusses the endangered digital archive of the Santa Barbara News-Press, a newspaper that recently declared bankruptcy. The newspaper, which had been in operation for 155 years, was purchased in 2000 by billionaire Wendy McCaw, who later meddled with the editorial independence of the newsroom. This led to a mass walk-out of the staff and a legal battle between McCaw and her former employees. The bankrupt paper’s assets, including its digital archive, are now at risk of being lost forever. The court has turned to liquidating the paper’s online assets, including its digital archives, social media accounts, and website domain names. A foreign company called Weyaweya, Ltd. from Malta has tentatively agreed to purchase these assets for $250,000, which has raised questions about their value and motives.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the recent sale of sports site Deadspin to investors affiliated with the online gaming affiliate industry in Malta. It mentions a story by 404 Media that identifies the specific names involved in the purchase and their motives. One of the key figures in the Deadspin purchase is also trying to buy a bankrupt newspaper’s website because of its SEO value. The article highlights the significance of this story, as it puts a community’s history at risk and suggests potential issues with future domain purchases.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses a concerning industry trend in which certain SEO companies are acquiring the domain names and historical digital content archives of defunct small-town American newspapers. This is done with the intention of turning them into profitable backlink farms. The author questions the long-term value of these backlink farms and also highlights the decline in the relevance of Google search queries due to ads and SEO-optimized content.
3. Full-scale file system acceleration on GPU [pdf]
Total comment counts : 12
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the idea of allowing a GPU to directly read blocks of data from NVMe or NVMe-over fabric, rather than relying on the CPU to do the work. The author suggests that this approach could be beneficial because PCIe allows data to be transferred between devices without involving the host CPU. The paper mentioned in the article explains that PMem is mapped directly to the GPU, and NVMe memory is accessed using Peer to Peer-DMA (P2PDMA). The article provides references to additional resources for more information on this topic.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article talks about a driver for Windows that allows users to create a virtual drive using the GPU RAM of NVIDIA cards. The driver is called GpuRamDrive and there are also forks available with support for AMD cards and additional fixes and features. Links to the GitHub repositories for these drivers are provided.
4. Running a Raspberry Pi with a read-only root filesystem
Total comment counts : 29
Summary
This article discusses how to run a Raspberry Pi with a read-only root file system in order to increase the lifespan of the SD card. It provides steps on how to disable unnecessary services, prevent the Pi from using the SD card for swap space, and update the system before making it read-only. The article also explains how to configure NTP to work with a read-only file system, allow the fake-hwclock to write to the SD card, and adjust networking files. It also mentions some considerations for using snaps on a read-only file system and suggests disabling the rfkill service if wireless devices are working properly. The author notes that these changes are risky and may render the Pi unbootable if not done correctly.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses two filesystems, SquashFS and EROFS, that are specifically designed for embedded, read-only use cases. SquashFS is known for its high data density and compression, while EROFS is optimized for high read speed. SquashFS is commonly used as a rootfs in many embedded applications with flash storage, often combined with tmpfs and persistent storage mount points or overlay mounts. The article mentions that in the Debian ecosystem, there is already a tool available to bootstrap a Debian image into SquashFS. However, it is surprising that the article does not mention these filesystems explicitly.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the issue of Raspberry Pi’s running into problems such as power failure and SD card corruption. The author suggests that the problem can be avoided by using a power supply that can deliver enough current, using good USB cables that are capable of carrying the current, avoiding cheap SD cards, and using an oversized SD card to enable proper wear-leveling. The author shares their own experience with Raspberry Pi’s running constantly since 2015 without encountering any issues, attributing it to using oversized cards and having their personal home directory on NFS.
5. Paint.net
Total comment counts : 37
Summary
The article could not be found on the server due to an error generated by Mod_Security.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the pros and cons of using paint.net for art tasks. The author mentions that the software is sufficient for mid-complexity tasks and has a nice, simple interface. They also highlight the availability of plenty of plugins. The author does not mind the proprietary format since they usually save their work as jpg or png and do not expect to open the files in other software. However, they recommend using newer programs like Krita instead, as paint.net’s plugins are disorganized, often out of date, and not working as intended. The author acknowledges the great community behind paint.net but believes there are better free options available, similar to Gimp.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the author’s experience of switching from Windows to Mac when M1 was released. They express missing Paint.net, a quick photo editor that they found brilliant. While some suggest using Pinta as an alternative on Mac, the author does not find it comparable. They mention Pixelmator Pro as a close alternative, although it is not free and has more weight than Paint.net.
6. Richard Serra, minimalist sculptor whose steel creations awed viewers, has died
Total comment counts : 20
Summary
Sculptor Richard Serra, known for his large steel sculptures that defined the Minimalist art movement, has passed away at the age of 85. His sculptures, which often utilized spirals, cubes, and cones of steel, were monumental in scale and had a threatening presence. Despite some controversy, Serra’s work pushed the boundaries of sculpture and challenged viewers to interact with space in new ways. His art was characterized as cold, unforgiving, and austere, often associated with masculine bravado. Serra’s influence on subsequent generations of artists was significant, and he was recognized for his contributions in various films and exhibitions. Born in San Francisco, Serra’s experiences with industrial materials and shipyards may have shaped his artistic style. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Yale University’s graduate art program.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article tells a story about artist Richard Serra being hired to build a sculpture called “Vectors” at Caltech. The sculpture was intended to be a giant wall placed on a green lawn on campus. However, students were unhappy because they enjoyed using the lawn for activities like frisbee. In response to the backlash, Serra put up another wall called “Eigenvectors” in front of the main coffee shop, blocking off the area. The wall was adorned with linear algebra formulas. Eventually, the students’ opposition prevailed and the sculpture was never built.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the potential dangers associated with Richard Serra’s steel sculptures, citing one death and two serious injuries caused during their installation and deinstallation. The author shares their personal experience of appreciating Serra’s work and acknowledges the risks involved. The victims of the accidents mentioned were all art technicians responsible for installing the artwork. The author also mentions their past involvement in assessing the structural strength of buildings to support another artist’s large lead books.
7. Engineers find a new way to convert carbon dioxide into useful products
Total comment counts : 19
Summary
MIT chemical engineers have developed a method for converting carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, which can be used to create useful compounds like ethanol and other fuels. This process, if scaled up for industrial use, could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other sources. The approach involves using electricity and a catalyst tethered to an electrode surface by strands of DNA, which increases the efficiency of the reaction. The researchers achieved a 100% Faradaic efficiency, meaning all the electrical energy used goes directly into the chemical reactions. The technology could be easily scaled up for industrial applications due to the relatively low cost of the carbon electrodes used.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses advancements in carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction and the importance of finding cost-effective methods for reducing CO2 emissions. It mentions that carbon monoxide (CO) is a useful precursor in various industrial processes and that sourcing it from CO2 in the air can enable carbon-negative technologies such as sustainable fuels and plastics. The article emphasizes that cost is the main driver for the widespread adoption of CO2 reduction methods, as they need to compete with established fossil sources and other reduction techniques. The focus of some research is on converting CO2 into C2+ molecules, which could offer a more efficient pathway to valuable chemicals. The article also mentions that researchers are exploring other products like methanol and ethanol through different catalysts. Overall, the article highlights the importance of not only reducing CO2 but also converting it into value-added molecules.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article suggests that life primarily consists of carbon and water, and it relies on a small amount of oxygen.
8. From scratch OpenGL and shaders with raw Xlib
Total comment counts : 3
Summary
This article discusses how to create a window with basic OpenGL using shaders instead of the fixed function pipeline. It provides the final code for creating the window and initializing the OpenGL context. The article focuses on the use of vertex buffer objects (VBO) and does not use vertex array objects (VAO). It explains how to bind the vertex and color data to the VBO and define the structure of the data using glVertexAttribPointer. The article also covers the implementation of the vertex and fragment shaders, and how to compile and link them into a program. Overall, the article provides a step-by-step guide for creating a window with modern OpenGL using shaders.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article suggests that it might be more practical to focus on XCB, a modern X11 client library replacement, rather than Xlib. Xlib has been a compatibility wrapper around XCB for about 15 years. The only situation where Xlib is necessary is for specific Vulkan-related tasks that do not have an XCB equivalent.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The user expressed disappointment that the article was not about implementing OpenGL functionalities by directly interacting with the GPU and X.
9. Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers (2023)
Total comment counts : 18
Summary
The article discusses a method called Read-Copy-Update (RCU) for locklessly sharing data between threads in an operating system. RCU is used when data is read constantly but written rarely, and it allows the writer to make changes without blocking any readers. The article explains the process of using RCU and how it resembles a generational garbage collector for immutable data structures. RCU is utilized in various platforms like Linux, Facebook’s Folly C++ library, and Rust’s concurrency libraries. The article argues against the common belief that garbage collection is slower and less efficient than manual memory management, highlighting that general-purpose memory allocators have their own overhead and contention between threads.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses two modern and parallel garbage collection (GC) techniques called MPL and MaPLe. These techniques propose provably efficient parallel GC based on disentanglement and provably efficient automatic granularity control. MaPLe (MPL) can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/MPLLang/mpl, and more information about Automatic Parallelism Management can be found at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632880. These techniques have received recognition, including a distinguished paper award in POPL 2024 and the ACM SIGPLAN dissertation award in 2023.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the use of garbage collectors (GCs) in memory management and argues that bespoke memory management solutions may offer better performance. The author believes that calling free() gives the memory back to the allocator, not the operating system, which is preferable due to slower system calls. The author performs a benchmark test comparing different memory management approaches and finds that a garbage collector results in a large number of unique pointers, which negatively impacts performance. The author concludes that GCs are more complex than alternatives like Rust’s borrow checker and suggests that bespoke solutions, such as RAII with static lifetimes, may be more appropriate for certain scenarios.
10. Some notes on Firefox’s media autoplay settings in practice as of Firefox 124
Total comment counts : 17
Summary
The author mentions their experience with streaming music on a digital music platform using Mozilla Firefox. They noticed that their Firefox instance at work seamlessly transitioned from one track to the next, while their home Firefox would pause between tracks. After investigating the settings, they discovered a difference in the media autoplay blocking policy. Their work Firefox had the default setting of allowing autoplay after interacting with the tab, while their home Firefox had a setting to require manual clicking to start the next track. The author explains that they originally set this to prevent YouTube from autoplaying a second video, but YouTube now has a disable autoplay setting. Since they listen to multi-track albums more often than YouTube videos, they decided to change the setting to allow autoplay on both instances of Firefox. They mention that they could avoid this issue by setting up a custom profile for the music source but haven’t done so yet. Finally, they mention that they may go back to the previous ‘stop after one track’ behavior if they find themselves unintentionally listening to too many albums.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article argues for the need to implement stricter settings for autoplay, not just for video and audio but also for large GIF files. The author suggests categorizing these settings under “energy-saving” to benefit both the server and reduce CPU usage on the client side. The article also suggests reviewing the triggers for autoplay activation, as some websites start autoplaying media when users scroll down using the main scrollbar. The author believes that the scrollbar should not provide any hints to the website, particularly regarding media autoplay.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses how Firefox’s default policy of allowing autoplay after interaction does not effectively stop autoplay on single-page applications (SPAs). While autoplay is initially blocked on the first page of SPAs like ESPN, it is enabled when navigating to subsequent pages as link clicks are intercepted and controlled by JavaScript. The author suggests that browsers should adopt a policy where click handlers for elements are ignored on non-whitelisted sites to address this issue.