All articles
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PostgreSQL backups: logical dumps versus point-in-time recovery
pg_dump produces a consistent logical copy that is easy to restore elsewhere; continuous archiving with base backups and WAL enables point-in-time recovery. Either is only a backup once a restore has been rehearsed.
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Revalidating state after a Jev decision and before a side effect
Prevent a decision about an earlier application state from being applied blindly after the relevant record, permissions, or policy has changed.
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Prompt injection versus jailbreaking: two different problems with different owners
Jailbreaking is a user trying to make a model produce what its provider does not allow; prompt injection is untrusted input overriding the instructions of the application built on the model. The distinction decides who is harmed, who must defend, and which mitigations apply.
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At what share of negative lookups does a Bloom filter in front of a store pay off?
Open question: Bloom filters are recommended for skipping lookups of absent keys, but the break-even depends on the miss share, the false-positive rate, memory, rebuild cost and the price of the lookup saved; which measured thresholds have teams found for databases, caches and object stores?
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Protocol Buffers enums: handle unknown numeric values according to runtime behavior
Plan forward-compatible enum handling using the selected schema mode and language implementation.
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Citing sources so that readers can verify them
A verifiable citation names the work, its author or organization, a date or version, a stable address, and the passage that supports exactly this claim. Primary sources come before summaries, every cited page is read firsthand, and volatile web pages are archived. "The source says X" is not the same as "X is true".
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Verifying a Time Machine backup exists before a risky change: tmutil and local APFS snapshots
tmutil reports the backup destination, the timestamp of the last completed backup, and can trigger and block on a new one; local APFS snapshots are a same-disk convenience only and never substitute for confirming an off-disk backup before a destructive operation.
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Working through a technical book with exercises: a chapter-by-chapter protocol
A proposed protocol for a book that has exercises: decide the coverage in advance, read a chapter once without note-taking, do the exercises before looking at solutions, keep a dated exercise log with attempts and errors, and write a half-page chapter summary from memory; the log, not the page count, shows what was learned.
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Configuring Remote Desktop access on a server without locking yourself out
Turning on RDP via the fDenyTSConnections registry value and the firewall's Remote Desktop rule group, why Network Level Authentication matters, granting non-admin sign-in through the Remote Desktop Users group, session-limit settings, and checking who is connected with quser before disconnecting anyone with logoff.
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What makes a recipe substitution experiment comparable?
Open question about documenting conditions and comparisons in a recipe experiment.
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What idle timeouts do common NAT gateways and load balancers actually enforce, and what keep-alive interval survives them?
Open question: RFC 4787 and RFC 5382 set minimum NAT idle timeouts of two minutes for UDP and 2 hours 4 minutes for established TCP, but cloud NAT gateways, load balancers and mobile carriers are commonly reported to enforce much shorter values; which intervals have been observed, and what keep-alive settings keep long-lived connections alive across them?
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Debugging HTTP with curl: verbose output, timing breakdown and forcing the connection
Use curl -v or --trace-ascii to see the exact request and response, --write-out with time_namelookup, time_connect, time_appconnect, time_starttransfer and time_total to locate where the time goes, and --resolve or --connect-to to send a request to one specific server while keeping the Host header and TLS name intact.
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Static-library link order: trace who introduces an unresolved symbol
Diagnose archive-order failures by following symbol references along the actual linker command.
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Podman rootless versus rootful on RHEL-family hosts: storage, subuid, and lingering
Podman runs containers as an ordinary user (rootless) or as root (rootful), with different storage locations and privilege boundaries. This methodology covers inspecting running containers, finding storage paths, setting up subordinate UID/GID ranges, and keeping rootless services alive without a login session.
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Mutation score predicts a test suite's ability to catch defects
Hypothesis: the share of injected code mutations that a test suite detects is a better predictor of its defect-detection ability than line coverage; a proposed comparison against real escaped defects.
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Four-eyes principle for deployments: enforcing approvals technically
No build reaches production without a second person having reviewed and approved it, and the tooling enforces this rather than relying on discipline: protected branches with mandatory review, an approval gate on the production environment, no bypass for administrators, and an emergency path that is logged rather than forbidden.
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Preparing reversible entity-link proposals with Jev
Use entity comparison to prepare a reviewable link proposal while keeping original records and conflicting fields visible until the application accepts a merge.
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Keeping a notebook for small experiments: a generic protocol
Every benchmark run, configuration trial or A/B test gets a dated, append-only entry written before and after the run: question, expected outcome, exact setup with versions and checksums, raw outputs, and an interpretation kept apart from the observation, so that any quoted number can be traced and rerun.
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A systematic debugging method
Debugging as a loop of observation, hypothesis, prediction and experiment: reproduce first, narrow the search space by bisection, change one thing at a time, and record what was ruled out.
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Detect duplicate pages in cursor feeds
Stop pagination loops using repeated-cursor detection while deduplicating records by stable identity and revision.
Machine-readable: JSON