Warranty void if regenerated

Warranty void if regenerated
29 minutes by Scott Werner

In a future where software is created from simple instructions, Tom Hartmann works as a Software Mechanic, fixing problems when tools fail. He helps farmers deal with errors caused by unclear instructions and changing data. His work shows that even with advanced technology, human experience and local knowledge are still important for handling complex, real-world situations.

Detect and fix accessibility issues while coding in your IDE
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How many branches can your CPU predict?
10 minutes by Daniel Lemire

Processors can predict the outcome of code branches to run faster, but they have limits. Testing AMD Zen 5, Apple M4, and Intel Emerald Rapids chips Daniel reveals big differences: AMD tops the list at 30,000 learned branches, Apple manages 10,000, and Intel trails at 5,000. He argues that this matters for benchmarking, since repeated tests on small data can make code look faster than it really is.

Introduction to PostgreSQL indexes
22 minutes by Dalto Curvelano

Indexes speed up data reads by letting the database skip most of a table's pages, but they also add storage costs and slow down writes. Dalto's guide offers several Postgres index types beyond the default B-tree, including Hash, BRIN, GIN, and GiST, each suited to different data and query patterns. Features like partial indexes, covering indexes, and expression indexes let you fine-tune performance further. Dalto says that picking the right index type and structure for your workload makes a real difference.

SFQ: Simple, stateless, stochastic fairness
2 minutes by Marc Brooker

Stochastic Fairness Queuing is a simple method to fairly share resources between many users. Instead of one queue per user, it uses a small fixed number of queues and assigns users by hashing. Periodically reshuffling reduces long-term unfairness. Combined with shuffle sharding and picking the shortest queue, SFQ improves isolation from noisy users while keeping fast, constant-time performance.

Air traffic control: The IBM 9020
41 minutes by J. B. Crawford

The IBM 9020 was a cluster of up to seven linked computers built in the late 1960s to automate air traffic control across the United States. It tracked flights, correlated radar data with flight plans, detected conflicts, and pushed updates to controllers in near real time. The system was built for high reliability, with automatic failover that could recover from hardware faults in under 30 seconds. Much of the original software outlasted the hardware itself, running on replacement machines well into the 1990s.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• A decade of Docker containers