We recently ran across a strange higgs-bugson that manifested itself in a critical system that stores and distributes the firm’s trading activity data, called Gord. (A higgs-bugson is a bug that is reported in practice but difficult to reproduce, named for the Higgs boson, a particle which was theorized in the 1960s but only found in 2013.) In this post I’ll walk you through the process I took to debug it. I tried to write down relevant details as they came up, so see if you can guess what the bug is while reading along.

This web app displays notes and slides in separate windows,
keeping both synchronised.
It accepts simple, double-width, or double-height PDF presentations:

The share_target manifest member allows installed Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to be registered as a share target in the system's share dialog.

Take control of your honks and join the federation.
An ActivityPub server with minimal setup and support costs.
Spend more time using the software and less time operating it.

Most functional languages rely on some garbage collection for automatic memory management. They usually eschew reference counting in favor of a tracing garbage collector, which has less bookkeeping overhead at runtime. On the other hand, having an exact reference count of each value can enable optimizations, such as destructive updates. We explore these optimization opportunities in the context of an eager, purely functional programming language. We propose a new mechanism for efficiently reclaiming memory used by nonshared values, reducing stress on the global memory allocator. We describe an approach for minimizing the number of reference counts updates using borrowed references and a heuristic for automatically inferring borrow annotations. We implemented all these techniques in a new compiler for an eager and purely functional programming language with support for multi-threading. Our preliminary experimental results demonstrate our approach is competitive and often outperforms state-of-the-art compilers.

Most programming language ecosystems provide assert functions in their testing libraries but not Go's. Go's standard testing package follows a more direct and to-the-point approach.

I make mostly IRC software in C. I like OpenBSD but also the GPL. I just want to read books and try to learn to be kinder. When I can I'd like to talk to strangers and experience more magic.

Sales pitches are the only place where “self-serve dashboards" work. In the real world, it's a different story.

Why "business" people don't use metabase/power-bi.

I've been running NetBSD on a RockPro64 since NetBSD 10-BETA, and I'm still happy with it now with NetBSD 10-RELEASE. I'm always looking for hardware to hack NetBSD though, and I recently watched a FOSDEM 2024 video: NetBSD 10: Thirty years, still going strong!. The Pinebook Pro laptop was mentioned at one point, which has the same RockChip SoC as the RockPro64. That reminded me I'd been wanting to give this inexpensive ARM 64 laptop a try.