A whirlwind tour of the Go memory allocator and garbage collector, with tools and tips on how to optimize.

Rather deep for a whirlwind tour.

source: L

ADLS is the first public PaaS cloud service that is designed to support full filesystem functionality at extreme scale.

Running through this year’s list of video games that made the most impact on the Ars staff, I’m struck by the sheer variety. Sure, there’s the usual selection of open world adventures and slick action games. But there are also a handful of fresh takes on the puzzle game genre, a few promising virtual reality games, a relatively wide variety of 2D platformers, racing games that run the gamut from realistic to campy, a couple of fighting games, and even a rhythm game!

20 more ways to spend time and money.

Twenty years ago, physicists set out to investigate a mysterious asymmetry in the proton’s interior. Their results, published today, show how antimatter helps stabilize every atom’s core.

We learn in school that a proton is a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks — two “up” quarks and a “down” quark, whose electric charges (+2/3 and −1/3, respectively) combine to give the proton its charge of +1. But that simplistic picture glosses over a far stranger, as-yet-unresolved story.

In reality, the proton’s interior swirls with a fluctuating number of six kinds of quarks, their oppositely charged antimatter counterparts (antiquarks), and “gluon” particles that bind the others together, morph into them and readily multiply. Somehow, the roiling maelstrom winds up perfectly stable and superficially simple — mimicking, in certain respects, a trio of quarks.

paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03282-z

source: HN

I just completed a series of changes that shrunk the Chrome browser’s on-disk size on Windows by over a megabyte, moved about 500 KB of data from its read/write data segments to its read-only data segments, and reduced its private working set by about 200 KB per-process.

As it so happens, object lifetime tracking (or Memory Reclamation as I prefer to call it) is the current most difficult open problem in shared memory concurrency. If you want to design or implement a lock-free or wait-free data structure, the hardest part isn’t designing/implementing the data structure itself. The hardest task is to add memory reclamation to this data structure, without reducing the progress or throughput of the data structure you designed/implemented.

source: HN

In a world of changing technology, there are few constants - but if there is one constant in security, it is the rhythmic flare-up of discussions about disclosure on the social-media-du-jour (mailing lists in the past, now mostly Twitter and Facebook).

In this blog post, I would like to highlight a few aspects of the discussion that are important to me personally - aspects which influenced my thinking, and which are underappreciated in my view.

source: grugq

Making up for lost bits.

source: grugq

This blog post details exploitation of arbitrary deserialization for the Ruby programming language and releases the first public universal gadget chain to achieve arbitrary command execution for Ruby 2.x. This will be described in the following sections which detail deserialization issues and related work, discovery of usable gadget chains, and finally exploitation of ruby serialization.

source: HN

Because it’s still open in the parent. Same problem arises on unix as well.

Bigger is better! Given a few assumptions...

Plus lasers and huckleberries.

source: MR

Qualys contacted by e-mail to tell me they found a vulnerability in OpenSMTPD and would send me the encrypted draft for advisory. Receiving this kind of e-mail when working on a daemon that can’t revoke completely privileges is not a thing you want to read, particularly when you know how efficient they are at spotting a small bug and leveraging into a full-fledged clusterfuck.

Legacy code bad, even when it’s freshly written legacy code.

After two weeks, it turns out letting strangers in has been the least-troubling part of the experience. Once Amazon owned my door, I was the one locked into an all-Amazon world.

source: HN

Learn new things about postgres.

source: danluu

An interactive experience!

source: DF

Unicode is more than a numbering scheme for the characters of every language – although that in itself is a useful accomplishment. Unicode also includes characters’ case, directionality, and alphabetic properties. The Unicode standard and specifications describe the proper way to divide words and break lines, sort text, format numbers, display text in different directions, split/combine/reorder vowels South Asian languages, and determine when characters may look visually confusable.

source: HN

The third party doctrine is obsolete. 88 pages of legal commentary and citations.

What happens when a liberal and a libertarian get together? In the case of Steve Teles and Brink Lindsey, they write a book. And then Tyler separates them for a podcast interview about that book, prisoner’s dilemma style.

source: MR

The first time around, many paywalls simply did not work. But times have changed. The New York Times’ success in transforming itself into a company that is markedly less dependent on advertising than it has been in recent years has emboldened many other publishers. The Times now makes more than 20 percent of its revenue on digital-only subscriptions, a number which has been growing quickly.