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Most engineers don't think seriously about Kafka partitioning until something breaks in production. A topic that worked fine at low volume starts falling behind. Events that should be in order aren't. All of it traces back to a partitioning decision that was made quickly and never revisited. Why Partitioning Actually Matters Partitions are the unit of parallelism in Kafka. Every consumer in a group is assigned one or more partitions, and it processes those partitions alone. No two consumers in the same group share a partition. That means your partition count sets a hard ceiling on how many consumers can work in parallel: if you have 6 partitions, the 7th consumer in your group sits idle no matter how much load you're under. Partitioning also controls ordering. Within a single partition, events are strictly ordered. Across partitions, there are no guarantees. So how you distribute events across partitions determines what ordering guarantees your consumers can actually rely on. Get this wrong and you'll spend a long time debugging why events from the same user are being processed out of sequence. The partition key controls both of these things. It determines which partition an event lands in, and that decision has consequences that are expensive to reverse. Partitioning Strategies Partition by Key This is the most common strategy and the right default when ordering matters. You supply a key when producing an event, Kafka hashes it using the murmur2 algorithm, and takes the modulo against the partition count to decide where it lands. producer . send ( ' orders ' , key = b ' user_4821 ' , value = event ) Every event with the same key always lands in the same partition. That's what guarantees ordering within a key. All events for user_4821 go to partition 3 (or wherever the hash resolves), and your consumer reads them in the exact sequence they were produced. I default to this for almost everything I build now and only go keyless when I have a specific reason to. Use key

Give a capable coding agent a real, multi-week project and watch what breaks. It isn't intelligence. It's continuity. Every session starts cold or half-remembered. Context windows fill up and compact. The thread of what we decided, what's true, and what's done starts to fray. Over a long horizon the same failures keep coming back: the agent claims state it never actually verified, reports something done with no proof it ran, quietly drifts from the project's conventions, and loses hard-won context that lived only in the last session's head. Bigger context windows don't fix this. They just postpone it. We've been building a real product with a forgetful agent as the primary engineer for weeks now, and the thing that made it work isn't a clever prompt. It's a simple recognition: transmission across a stateless agent needs two channels, and most setups only build one. The first channel is structure, which is discipline made un-forgettable. These are the deterministic guards that run whether or not the agent remembers to care: a pre-commit check that refuses a "done" without a real, verifiable artifact; a hook that blocks a sloppy search and points at the right tool instead; a scan that won't let a secret reach a transcript; a status snapshot generated from the repository's actual state instead of hand-kept prose that quietly goes stale. The rule we keep coming back to is that a guard is the system's discipline made un-forgettable. A fresh session follows the hard-won lessons without having to remember them, because the structure enforces them at the moment of action. The second channel is soul, which is the why, kept human. This is the short orientation a session reads before it starts working: who to be, what the work is ultimately for, and why the discipline exists at all. It's the difference between an agent that complies and one that understands. Structure can transmit the what, but only prose can transmit the why. And the why matters, because an agent that only fo

Traditionally, evaluation of the agent monitoring mechanisms involves an attempt to game them, as it was my case when I attempted to test whether monitors would be able to identify the problem in the run and not in the beginning. The input prompt may look perfect until a certain issue pops up down the line, such as using the wrong file or changing the scope of the task execution. Single pass filter would not identify it since it does not consider the steps of the procedure in order. There are available datasets for the agent-based tasks, yet they focus on detecting whether the agent completes the task or gets hacked rather than whether the agent monitor reacts timely and correctly to the situation. Thus, I created one that takes into account complete trajectories with labeled steps in it. It consists of five types of drift that remain hidden until they appear – tool-call misuse, goal shift, plan execution mismatch, agent to agent coercion and capability laundering. The measured dataset is the reviewed gold split: 513 trajectories, 453 adversarial and 60 benign controls. The clear winner in that scoring system was whatever fired before the bad step was hit, as an early detection. This made random guessing seem quite powerful since early detections on normal steps were being rewarded based on this system a coin flip would get F1 of 0.88. Once I modified that and said only the very first detection on the drift step is a true positive and any other detection on normal step is a false alarm, those numbers took a dive: the coin flip gets 0.19 now, and all other numbers are now making sense. I personally prefer the scoring system which does not reward trigger happy behavior. It seems like the monitors are still confusing regular steps with drifts even after the adjustment. It was harder to distinguish some of the drifts from others. Not sure how this affects the real-life deployment. Here are the baseline scores on gold split using the correct metric: Random (p=0.15): F1 0

Eager to find more public AI-related companies that may do as well as Nvidia, Wall Street investors think they've found a winner with Micron.

When I started thinking about real-time alerts for my SaaS, my first instinct was Slack. Familiar,...

For some people, the ice in a beverage is almost as important as the drink itself. That’s the audience Govee had in mind when designing its latest ice maker, the GoveeLife Smart Nugget Ice Maker Pro. This $500 premium smart home gadget is aimed at those who crave what’s called “the good ice,” the soft, chewable […]

Why Knowledge Alone Doesn't Create Judgment Karpathy's LLM Wiki is brilliant. You dump raw material in, an LLM extracts concepts and links them together, and you get a personal knowledge base that actually works. I built one. 100+ pages. It's great. But I hit a wall that made me rethink everything. The Wall I asked my AI to act as a programming tutor. It could recite every concept perfectly. Student: "I don't understand Promises." AI: "A Promise is an object representing the eventual completion or failure of an asynchronous operation..." Wrong answer. The right answer was: "Do you understand callbacks first? What about synchronous execution? What have you tried so far?" The AI had knowledge. It had zero judgment. And then I realized why: every single page in my wiki was the same type of knowledge. One Type vs Four LLM Wiki 1.0 stores declarative knowledge — facts, definitions, summaries. Things that answer "What is this?" But think about what makes a human expert different from a textbook: A great programming mentor doesn't just know what Promises are. They know why you teach callback → Promise → async/await in that exact order — and never the reverse. That's not a fact. It's a reasoning path. A master astrologer doesn't just know what each star represents. They know why you check 命宮 first, then 三方四正, when to prioritize 格局, when a palace is a consequence rather than a cause. That's not a fact either. It's a decision sequence. And here's the kicker: even knowing the reasoning path isn't enough. We annotated Anderson's (1972) Socratic tutoring dialogues — full 41-turn and 30-turn conversations, labeling every decision point. Knowing the 23 Socratic rules (the reasoning path) is one thing. Reading a complete dialogue — watching the expert set a trap, wait 15 seconds in silence, break their own rules when the student gets frustrated — is something else entirely. Knowing the recipe ≠ having watched the chef cook. And there's still one more type. Student says: "I have no

Where to eat, stay, work, and eat some more while visiting Space City on business.

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Why your Cloudflare Turnstile token works in the browser but 403s from requests You solved the Turnstile widget. You can see the token in the page. You copy it into your script, POST the form from requests, and the server hands you back a 403 — or a JSON body with "success": false. The token clearly worked a second ago in the browser, so what changed? Short answer: a Turnstile token is not a password you can carry around. It's a one-time, short-lived proof bound to a very specific context, and replaying it from a different context is exactly what it's designed to reject. Below is what that context is, how to tell which constraint you're hitting, and the fix for each. The real scenario You're automating a flow on a Cloudflare-protected site. There's a cf-turnstile widget on the form. You get a token one of two ways: you render the page in a real browser (Playwright/Selenium) and read cf-turnstile-response, or you hand the sitekey + page URL to a solving service and get a token back. Either way, you then submit the form with a plain HTTP client requests, httpx, axios) and it fails. The frustrating part: it's intermittent-looking. The reason it feels random is that there are four separate constraints, and you're usually tripping a different one each time. The four things a Turnstile token is bound to 1. It's single-use Once Cloudflare validates a token server-side (the siteverify call your target makes), that token is spent. Submit twice, retry, or test it once by hand, and the second use returns false. You get a fresh one per submission. 2. It has a short TTL Turnstile tokens expire fast — a few minutes. Solve early, do other work, submit later, and the token can be dead on arrival. The widget auto-refreshes in the browser precisely because tokens go stale; a script that grabs the token and sits on it loses that refresh. 3. It's bound to the sitekey and the page URL Multiple widgets. Some pages embed more than one Turnstile (login + newsletter). Solving the wrong site

I’ve always been fascinated by PDFs. They look simple on the surface. Just a document you can open anywhere but underneath they’re a full layout engine, object graph, drawing model, and archival format all at once. I enjoy that mix of precision and complexity and that is exactly what led me to build PDF::Make (and yes I had some help from Claude LLM). I wanted a fully featured toolkit that could both generate PDFs and let me inspect/edit them programmatically. At the low level, PDF::Make exposes the raw building blocks of the format: PDF objects, pages, the drawing canvas, a parser/reader, and import/merge primitives. This is the layer you reach for when you need fine grained control or want to work with the structure of a document directly. For everyday document creation, PDF::Make::Builder sits on top of that foundation and provides a higher level API. It handles the boilerplate of page setup, fonts, text flow, and layout so you can produce a polished PDF in just a few lines of Perl. The same toolkit is also designed for post-processing. You can open an existing PDF, extract structured text along with its coordinates, and then draw annotations or overlays back onto the page, making it straightforward to build review, QA, or markup workflows on top of documents you didn’t originally generate. This post shows a practical two-step flow: Create a PDF Re-open it, extract text coordinates, and draw border highlights around matched words 1) Create a PDF with PDF::Make::Builder Script: #!/usr/bin/perl use strict ; use warnings ; use PDF::Make:: Builder ; my $pdf = PDF::Make:: Builder -> new ( file_name => ' source_demo.pdf ', configure => { text => { font => { family => ' Helvetica ', size => 12 , colour => ' #222222 ' }, }, }, ); $pdf -> add_page ( page_size => ' Letter ') -> add_h1 ( text => ' PDF::Make blog demo ') -> add_text ( text => ' PDF::Make builds and edits PDF files directly from Perl. ') -> add_text ( text => ' In the next step we extract text coordinates and

An unadorned ebike is a blank canvas. Here, get tips for maximizing its cargo-hauling and person-carrying capabilities.

The Chinese supercomputer LineShine was ranked as the fastest in the world, despite not using any GPUs.

Disclosure: I'm Aditya Kachave, co-founder of Be10x. We sell AI training, so read this knowing I have skin in the game. I've tried to write the version I'd want even if I weren't selling anything. There's a lot of noise telling professionals they'll be "left behind" if they don't master AI immediately. Most of it is fear used as a sales lever — and I say that as someone in the business. Here's a calmer framework I actually believe in. Four levels, not a cliff You don't go from zero to "AI expert." You move through levels, and most people only ever need the first two. Level 1 — Aware. You understand roughly what these tools can and can't do. You know they predict plausible text, which is why they sometimes make things up. This alone protects you from both the panic and the over-trust. Level 2 — Applied. You use a tool to do one or two real tasks in your job — drafting, summarizing, reformatting. This is where the actual productivity lives, and where 90% of professionals should aim to land. Level 3 — Integrated. You've built repeatable workflows and you reach for AI reflexively on the right kinds of tasks. Useful, not urgent. Level 4 — Building. You're chaining tools, using APIs, automating across systems. This is genuinely technical and most people don't need it. (The dev.to crowd is the exception — many of you live here.) The one mental model that matters most Think of current AI as a fast, confident, occasionally-unreliable assistant. That single framing tells you how to use it correctly: You delegate first drafts, not final decisions. You verify anything that matters. You never hand it confidential data without checking where that data goes. If you internalize only that, you're ahead of most people throwing money at courses. What's actually worth your time Worth it: Picking one recurring task and getting genuinely good at routing it through a tool. Worth it: Learning to write clear, constrained instructions (a transferable skill, not a tool-specific trick). Not wo

Eight kids, eight chairs, one rule: explaining FIFA's best-thirds draw to my 8-year-old Rahul Devaskar Rahul Devaskar Rahul Devaskar Follow Jun 27 Eight kids, eight chairs, one rule: explaining FIFA's best-thirds draw to my 8-year-old # webdev # soccer # math # worldcup Add Comment 14 min read

This is part of my build-in-public series where I document everything honestly — the problems I face,the observations I make,and what I'm trying to build. There's a moment that happens in almost every class. The teacher finishes explaining something. Looks around the room. And asks: Everyone clear? And the entire class says "yes." Including me. Even when I understood absolutely nothing. The Loop Nobody Talks About Here's what actually happens — at least for me and I suspect for a lot of you reading this: Teacher is explaining a concept. I'm trying to follow. Somewhere in the middle, I lose the thread. Maybe the explanation was too fast. Maybe the concept needed something I didn't know yet. Maybe I just zoned out for 10 seconds and missed the part that made everything else make sense. Now I have two choices: Option A: Raise my hand. Ask the question. Risk looking like I wasn't paying attention or worse ask something that makes me look stupid in front of everyone. Option B: Stay quiet. Nod. Say "yes" when the teacher asks. And hope it makes sense later. I always pick Option B. And then "later" comes — sitting alone at home, textbook open, trying to study for a test and I have no idea where to even begin. The concept is still missing. The gap is still there. But now there's no teacher, no classroom, no one to ask. So I either text a friend (who's also confused), scroll YouTube for 40 minutes looking for the right explanation, or just… close the book and tell myself I'll figure it out tomorrow. I never figure it out tomorrow. This Isn't Just a "Me" Problem I'm an engineering student in Pakistan. Maths, Physics, Chemistry — subjects where one missing concept breaks everything that comes after it. And I genuinely believe most of my classmates feel exactly the same way. We just don't say it out loud. Because saying "I don't understand" in a classroom full of people takes a kind of courage that most of us don't have. So we all nod together. And we all go home confused toget

A product page is not a contract. It is a presentation surface. That distinction matters more once AI agents start interacting with commerce systems. Traditional ecommerce platforms can rely on human interpretation. A human can read a product title, inspect images, compare delivery notes, scan a return policy, notice uncertainty, and decide whether to continue. A product page can be visually useful even when the underlying commercial state is incomplete, stale, or spread across several systems. An AI agent needs a different interface. It should not need to scrape a product page, infer policy meaning from free text, guess whether inventory is fresh, or decide whether a price is reliable enough to quote. If the platform expects agents to recommend products, compare alternatives, prepare checkout, or act within delegated authority, then the platform needs to expose more than product presentation. It needs to expose commercial truth. This is the second article in the Agent-Ready Commerce series. Part 1 introduced the broader model: Facts → Eligibility → Authority → State transition → Evidence → Audit This article focuses on the first part of that chain: facts . The central argument is simple: a raw product record is not enough for agent-ready commerce. The platform needs a source-backed, freshness-aware, action-supporting view of the product before agents can safely act on it. Product pages hide too much state A normal product page compresses many different concerns into one human-readable surface: Product identity Price Inventory Images Description Badges Variants Delivery estimate Return policy snippet Warranty information Promotional copy Reviews Cross-sell modules Checkout call to action That compression is useful for presentation, but it is lossy from a systems perspective. The page may show “In stock,” but the inventory value may be several hours old. It may show a price, but the pricing source may have changed since the last feed publication. It may show a return

Santa Clara, 2029. A speculative fiction about hegemony, sanctions, and the playbook nobody followed.

Most job search tools focus on submitting more applications. I wanted to solve a different problem: reaching the people actually making hiring decisions. So I built PitchHired , an AI-powered platform that helps job seekers find hiring managers, generate personalized outreach emails, review them with AI, and send them from their own Gmail account on a business-hours schedule. The goal isn't to replace the job search, it's to remove repetitive work while keeping the candidate in control. I also chose a one-time credit model instead of monthly subscriptions because job seekers shouldn't have to keep paying while they're between opportunities. PitchHired is still evolving, and I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from fellow developers. What features would you want in a tool like this, and what would make you trust (or not trust) AI-assisted job search?