Personally I think child processes are the right approach for this. Launch a new process* for each query and it can (if you choose to go that route) dynamically load in compiled code. Exit when you’re done, and the dynamically loaded code is gone. A side benefit of that is memory leaks are contained, since all memory you allocate is about to be removed anyway.

I’d probably be fine with hundreds or thousands of these hanging in memory. I suspect the generated code for a single query would be in hundreds of kilobytes, maybe a megabyte. But yeah, this is one of those technical details I’d worry about.

Honestly, I wonder if you could just use an actual HTTP server for this? They can handle hundreds or even thousands of simultaneous requests. They can handle requests that complete in a fraction of a millisecond or ones that run for several hours. And they have good tools to catch/deal with code that segfaults, hits an endless loop, attempts to allocate terabytes of swap, etc. HTTP also has wonderful tools to load balance across multiple servers if you do need to scale to massive numbers of requests.

Not sure how a HTTP server would solve the CPU bottleneck of scanning terabytes of data per query?

I somehow didn’t think a regular JIT solution might be applicable here, but it is. Thank you! There seems to be a number of projects doing JIT for C++, will look at them.

Kernel is not a monolithic application, and you cannot develop it like one. There are tons of actors: independent developers, small support companies (like Collabora), corporations, all with different priorities. There is a large number of independent forks (e.g. for obscure devices), that will never be merged, but need to merge e.g. security patches from the mainline. A single project management tool won’t do, not your typical business grade tracking&reporting tool.

CI is already there. Not a central one—again, distributed across different organizations. Different organizations have different needs for CI, e.g. supporting weird architectures that they need to develop against.

There is a reason Torvalds created git—existing tools just wouldn’t work. There might be a place for a similar revolution regarding a bugtracker…

This plea for help is specifically for non-coding, but still deeply technical work.

The thread is an attempt to merge a new file system, bcachefs. This is a large change, requiring a lot of review from experienced developers, and getting anyone to do this work turned out to be difficult. Darrick here started talking how, in general, all development of file systems in Linux is troubled by lack of manpower.

I guess the best start would be to have a person to organize volunteers.

Another idea that just occurred to me. Maybe position: absolute; both the real content and the gibberish content with the same top, left, width, and height attributes so that the real content and the gibberish overlap and occupy the same location on the page. Make sure both the real and gibberish content elements have no background so that remains clear. Put the gibberish content in the DOM before the real content. (I think that will ensure that the gibberish appears behind the real content even without setting the z-index.) And then make JS set the color of the text in the gibberish element the same color as the background so humans can’t see it.

Be aware that these techniques can affect accessibility for people using screen readers.

As of May 2023, 65% of the Ukrainian refugees that left Ukraine starting February 2022 and decided to stay in Poland found a job—so, within around a year, as opposed to 5-6 years as in the article. Cultural similarity here is likely making it much, much simpler. For those who want to read more about the situation of Ukrainian refugees in Poland, this report by Polish National Bank (Narodowy Bank Polski, NBP) might be useful: https://nbp.pl/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Raport_Imigranci_EN.pdf (in English!), there is a lot of interesting details.

Yep, thank you, that’s pretty close to what I imagined!

I do not have notes from that time anymore, sorry. I do recall though that after following a chain of citations I ended up at the paper in the center of this controversy. Nobody sane would cite in now except to point out its flaws, but if there’s a modern paper that cites a 10 year old paper that cites a 30 year old paper that cites it—people usually won’t notice.

From my experience, despite all the citogenesis described in other comments here, Wikipedia citations are still better vetted than in many, many scientific papers, let alone regular journalism :/ I recall spending days following citation links in already well-cited papers to basically debunk basic statements in the field.

Last job, we started writing mixing bits of Kotlin in an otherwise mostly-Java in a monolithic Spring-based service. Good experience.

One reason (among many) is that employment in American companies is less stable than in Europe with strong employment laws. Twitter could not do the same type of layoffs in Europe, with stories like this one being pretty common. But this safety net has a cost, and the cost is a part of total employment cost for employers. Whether the safety net is worth it for employees in IT, that’s another matter—but it can’t not be taken into account because of the law.

BTW, in some European countries there is a strong culture of IT workers doing long-term contractor work exactly to trade off employment laws for (usually quite a lot) higher wage.

I found it crazy useful to study old, established, mature technologies, like relational databases, storage, low-level networking stack, optimizing compilers, etc. Much more valuable than learning the fad of the year. For example, consider studying internals of Postgresql if you’re using it.