Hasnain says:

“This is the story of some DC reporters who got upset that they didn’t get invited to a wedding. Nothing more. And naturally, when faced with pushback (such as asking why Cook didn’t bother to read the photo caption), these journalists got even more defensive, arguing that people just don’t understand how journalism works.”

Hasnain says:

“But that displacement happens only because building dense housing is illegal in many rich neighborhoods, and because cities build so little of it overall. “If you want to build enough to really help low-income people, you’re talking about doing a lot of building,” Rick Jacobus, an expert on inclusionary housing and the principal of Street Level Urban Impact Advisors, told me.

As it turns out, two economists had, in a way, answered my question. Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley and Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago wanted to know how much GDP and productivity the United States gives up by throttling the housing supply in its biggest cities. In a blockbuster 2019 paper, they found that if New York, San Jose, and San Francisco—just those three cities—had the permitting standards of Atlanta or Chicago over the previous several decades, the U.S. economy would have been roughly $2 trillion bigger in 2009. American households would have earned an average of $3,685 more a year.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting technical read.

“In this post, we demonstrated how we built the fastest interpreter for Lua (to date) through a novel meta-compiler framework.

However, automatically generating the fastest Lua interpreter is only the beginning of our story. LuaJIT Remake is designed to be a multi-tier method-based JIT compiler generated by the Deegen framework, and we will generate the baseline JIT, the optimizing JIT, the tiering-up/OSR-exit logic, and even a fourth-tier heavyweight optimizing JIT in the future.”

Hasnain says:

“This little trick shipped in Firefox 105 and had an enormous impact on Firefox stability on Windows. The chart below shows how many out-of-memory browser crashes were experienced by users per active usage hours

You’re looking at a >70% reduction in crashes, far more than our rosiest predictions.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great technical read that goes into a lot of distributed systems stuff.

“We mostly like Consul and would use it again in new designs. It’s easy to stand up. It’s incredibly useful to deploy infrastructure configurations. For example: we write blog posts like this and people invariably comment about how cool it is that we have a WireGuard mesh network between all of our machines. But, not to diminish Steve’s work on flywire, that system falls straight out of us using Consul. It’s great!

But we probably wouldn’t use Consul as the backing store for a global app platform again, in part because a global app platform might not even want a single globally consistent backing store. Our trajectory is away from it.”

Hasnain says:

SRO/SRE stories are always legendary

“Chasing down the Blips can teach you a lot about how a complex system functions. Sometimes it can help you find real problems before they happen. And a lot of the time, they'll teach you only one thing: That complex systems are chaotic, and sometimes things just harmlessly Blip and you'll never know why.

Our general policy was that if a Blip was big enough to set off an alert, we'd give it at least a cursory look.”

Hasnain says:

Sigh. Tucker Carlson, Fox News, Libs of TikTok and all the media commenters “just asking questions” have even more blood on their hands here. The quote below is a little misleading as the article and other reporting clarifies: the club was going to host a drag show and there has been a lot of nonsensical hatred against those recently.

“Although a motive in the shooting wasn’t yet clear, nor were the gender identities of the victims, the incident came as anti-gay rhetoric has intensified by extremists. In a statement, Club Q termed the shooting a hate attack.”

Hasnain says:

always learn something new with Amos’ posts.

“This is boring. Everything just works.

Right?? And yet I'm thrilled about it. I'm thrilled to know that, with Rust, I can do any of:

blocking I/O with threads
non-blocking I/O with tokio
io-uring with tokio-uring
eBPF with aya
just read procfs

And they all, boringly enough, work just fine. And I feel good about leaving them in production and never touching them again.

To me, that is the dream.”

Hasnain says:

Gotta love deep technical reads on fast data structures.

“Conclusions and next steps
boost::unordered_flat_map and boost::unordered_flat_set are the new open-addressing containers in Boost.Unordered providing top speed in exchange for some interface and behavioral deviations from the standards-compliant boost::unordered_map and boost::unordered_set. We have analyzed their internal data structure and provided some theoretical and practical evidence for their excellent performance. As of this writing, we claim boost::unordered_flat_map/boost::unordered_flat_set to rank among the fastest hash containers available to C++ programmers.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on how to profile, benchmark, and improve the performance of software.

“The test we used to measure performance, cating a big file, only measures performance in a very specific circumstance. There are other scenarios in which the performance of Zellij lacks or shines. It’s also important to note that because we are measuring the performance of full apps in a relatively complex and not 100% sterile environment, the measurements in this post should be regarded as loose signposts rather than exact measurements.

Zellij does not claim to be faster or more performant than any other software. Performance-wise, it only uses other software as an inspiration and something to aspire to.”