Clock synchronization is a nightmare

Clock synchronization is a nightmare
16 minutes by Arpit Bhayani

Computer clocks drift due to temperature changes and manufacturing variations, causing machines to disagree on time within hours. This breaks databases, builds, and debugging when events appear out of order. Solutions range from simple NTP providing millisecond accuracy to Google's TrueTime using atomic clocks and GPS for sub-microsecond precision. Logical clocks like Lamport timestamps track event causality without physical time.

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How Lobsters front page works
4 minutes by Atharva Raykar

The Lobsters website ranks stories using a formula that balances engagement against age. Story scores grow logarithmically with upvotes, while age increases linearly over time, ensuring older posts gradually fall down the rankings. The algorithm includes safeguards against low-quality controversial content and gives slight boosts to certain post types.

Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
2 minutes by Quan Nguyen

Quan argues that communication will become the top skill for software engineers as AI coding agents handle most programming tasks. Getting good results from AI requires clear specifications, but real world problems are often incomplete. Engineers must now ask probing questions, facilitate discussions, and make judgment calls about unclear requirements.

Dithering part II
7 minutes by Damar Berlari

Damar published the second part of his dithering visual article. This one mainly explores the threshold map and how it generates those unique visual patterns.

What came first: The CNAME or the a record?
10 minutes by Sebastiaan Neuteboom

A routine update to Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service caused widespread internet connection failures on January 8, 2026. The update changed how DNS records were ordered in responses, placing CNAME records after other records instead of before them. While most modern software handles record order flexibly, some implementations like glibc expect CNAME records to appear first and failed when this changed. The issue stems from 40-year-old protocol ambiguity in DNS specifications about proper record ordering.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• Napkin math