At a time when scientists know more than they ever have before about the inner lives of animals--and when concerns about animal rights loom large--many experts think that zoos need a major overhaul if they’re going to last.

Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to arena allocation. With practice, it’s effective, simple, and fast; typically as easy to use as garbage collection but without the costs. Depending on need, an allocator can weigh just 7–25 lines of code — perfect when lacking a runtime. With the core details of my own technique settled, now is a good time to document and share lessons learned. This is certainly not the only way to approach arena allocation, but these are practices I’ve worked out to simplify programs and reduce mistakes.

See also: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2023/09/30/

An easy-to-implement, arena-friendly hash map

source: L

On the other hand if you have valuable stuff you can leave it with the bank, and the bank will keep it in a box for you, but that is sort of an accident. It is not a core banking function, not really a banking function at all except for historical reasons. And sometimes they’ll drill open the box and throw your stuff out!

Original story: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box-theft.html

It turns out that, statistically, heart surgeons are better at heart surgery than barbers are. What about dermatologists, are they better at sourcing and identifying private-equity and venture-capital investments than private-equity professionals are?

Original: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/your-money/diy-private-equity.html

source: ML

Soon after we started building Spectrum, we hit a major technical obstacle: Spectrum requires us to accept connections on any valid TCP port, from 1 to 65535. On our Linux edge servers it’s impossible to “accept inbound connections on any port number”. This is not a Linux-specific limitation: it’s a characteristic of the BSD sockets API, the basis for network applications on most operating systems.

GitHub’s forgot password feature could be compromised because the system lowercased the provided email address and compared it to the email address stored in the user database. If there was a match, GitHub would send the reset password link to the email address provided by the attacker- which was technically speaking, not the same email address.

This is beautiful.

source: HN

Established, traditional order is under assault from freewheeling, networked disrupters as never before. But society craves centralized leadership, too.

I think the idea is to stop before going full French Revolution. Just a touch of change, please.

Mr. Ferguson’s new book, “The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook,” will be published by Penguin Press on Jan. 16.

I went through two years of OpenBSD errata for the most recent four releases (6.1, 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4) and categorized each bug.

source: L

Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time.

The hidden constant separating the time complexities of two reasonable algorithms under asymptotic analysis can get quite big because of cache effects. Understanding how CPU caches work helps make good choices for writing fast programs and I hope this article provided some insight.

More on the subject: https://github.com/meribold/cache-seminar-paper

source: L

10 years ago, systemd was announced and swiftly rose to become one of the most persistently controversial and polarizing pieces of software in recent history, and especially in the GNU/Linux world. The quality and nature of debate has not improved in the least from the major flame wars around 2012-2014, and systemd still remains poorly understood and understudied from both a technical and social level despite paradoxically having disproportionate levels of attention focused on it.

I am writing this essay both for my own solace, so I can finally lay it to rest, but also with the hopes that my analysis can provide some context to what has been a decade-long farce, and not, as in Benno Rice’s now famous characterization, tragedy.

source: grugq

I’ve recently been looking into a fascinating corner of mathematics that at first glance appears a little bit silly, but actually has far-reaching applications, from physics to numerical methods to machine learning. I thought I’d share what I’ve learned over the next few episodes.

I assume you recall what a complex number is, but perhaps not all of the details. A complex number is usually introduced as a pair of real numbers (a, b), where a is called the “real part” and b is called the “imaginary part”.

A brief aside: it has always bugged me that these labels are unnecessarily value-laden. There is no particular “reality” that is associated with the real part; it is every bit as “imaginary” as the imaginary part. They might as well be called the “rezrov part” and the “gnusto part”, but we’re stuck with “real” and “imaginary”. Moving on.

Functor, Applicative, Monad, Enlightenment. It’s all about the fame.

Breaking type systems for fun and profit.

Paper: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/namin/unsound/master/doc/unsound-oopsla16.pdf

Prospecting for gold by looking for it in leaves has finally proved itself commercially in Australia

The quantities are minuscule. In areas where there is no gold, leaves may have a background level of 0.15 parts per billion (ppb) of gold; on gold-rich sites that can rise to 4ppb.

source: HN

This implementation is based on Machoc, originally published by ANSSI during SSTIC2015 as a part of polichombr (https://github.com/ANSSI-FR/polichombr). The algorythm is roughly the same, but unlike ANSSI’s Machoc, is implemented using radare2 and r2pipe instead of miasm or IDApython.

source: grugq

As with all the processor retrospective series, I’m going to focus on how Windows NT used the Intel 80386 in user mode because the original audience for all of these discussions was user-mode developers trying to get up to speed debugging their programs. Normally, this means that I omit instructions that you are unlikely to see in compiler-generated code. However, I’ll set aside a day to cover some of the legacy instructions that are functional but not used in practice.

2: Memory addressing modes https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190122-00/?p=100755

3: Flags and condition codes https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190123-00/?p=100765

4: Arithmetic https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190124-00/?p=100785

5: Logical operations https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190125-00/?p=100795

6: Data transfer instructions https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190128-00/?p=100805

7: Conditional instructions and control transfer https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190129-00/?p=100815

8: Block operations https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190130-00/?p=100825

9: Stack frame instructions https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190131-00/?p=100835

10: Atomic operations and memory alignment https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190201-00/?p=100845

11: The Thread Environment Block https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190204-00/?p=100855

12: The stuff you don’t need to know https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190205-00/?p=100865

13: Calling conventions https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190206-00/?p=100875

14: Rescuing a stack trace after the debugger gave up when it reached an FPO function https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190207-00/?p=100885

15: Common compiler-generated code sequences https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190208-00/?p=100895

16: Code walkthrough https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190211-00/?p=100905

17: Future developments https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190212-00/?p=100915

Sometimes, it’s possible to create something that’s too useful, that is designed for a niche purpose but is so well-attuned to that purpose that it attracts other people, who find a similar value but different use case than was intended. And because of the sheer prevalence of said useful tool, it suddenly is everywhere—finding purpose as a cheap alternative to a trip to the local department store. If you’re the maker of that too-useful something, whaddya do? Well, in the case of the dairy industry, you use your political influence to try to ban all those college students from using milk crates. In today’s Tedium, we talk about the bizarre legal status of the plastic milk crate.

“They are looking for people who are doing even the smallest crime, because, what we’ve learned is, those who will go out and steal a milk crate, for example, are the same people who are probably breaking into cars, breaking into your house.”

And getting caught once means your entire toolchain can get wrapped up. This is why operational gaps are so dangerous.

In addition, machines you have implants on get upgraded all the time.

Unfortunately not quite, but it’s a good point about how to become an unattractive target.

We provide a comprehensive policy and doctrinal analysis of the use of poison pills again activists in corporate governance contests. Although pills have been in common use as anti-takeover devices since the 1980s, it is only now—in the context of anti-activist pills—that many design features of pills start to matter. The reason lies in the different sources of gains derived by the raiders of yore and today’s activists.

source: ML

The Baseline Interpreter sits between the C++ interpreter and the Baseline JIT and has elements from both. It executes all bytecode instructions with a fixed interpreter loop (like the C++ interpreter). In addition, it uses Inline Caches to improve performance and collect type information (like the Baseline JIT).

source: HN