Turkey Updated 2025-07-16
The toplevel transaction is 78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e
Like all AtomSea & EMBII uploads, the data it is encoded as P2FKH.
The full concatenated payload contains the following ASCII characters:
8881a937a437ff6ce83be3a89d77ea88ee12315f37f7ef0dd3742c30eef92dba|396*8881a937a437ff6ce83be3a89d77ea88ee12315f37f7ef0dd3742c30eef92dba
575061146335bd57f2dc132112152d0eeea44cf187ea6a52ac02435a7e5bea44
674c7cc34ea44bb276c6caf76f2b28fa1597380ab6e6a6906076d8f7229ca5b3
8e2642416ad20924b43f51a633fa1c0a5ba8e4a7b631877db1c64540a42081c9
a3084018096b92af04df57b6116e01ff4b7c7e8bd228235ed49e23f4a2817029
39348722b841afa0c5b67e5af10839afe965ed1b24874e89336bea9fa4ef3091
tomSea & EMBII
Output 2 is a change, so it contains no data and has been excluded. Change appear to be randomly placed in the list of output of the uploads, but they can be easily removed because they are the only output with a different value.
The newlines shown above are explicitly encoded as CR LF newlines with characters 0d 0a.
396 is the number of payload bytes between 396*8881a937a437ff6ce83be3a89d77ea88ee12315f37f7ef0dd3742c30eef92dba and the last txid 39348722b841afa0c5b67e5af10839afe965ed1b24874e89336bea9fa4ef3091, including newlines but exclusding the last line.
The last line appears to contain arbitrary data to fill out the 20 byte payload granularity:
  • A is missing from AtomSea
  • there is a NUL character just after EMBII, possibly part of the protocol?
Now let's inspect the transactions linked to from toplevel.
tx 8881a937a437ff6ce83be3a89d77ea88ee12315f37f7ef0dd3742c30eef92dba contains only payloads without any change. It starts with the following UTF-8 string with CR LF spaces;
"396\“There is nothing like returning to a place
 that remains unchanged to find the ways in
 which you yourself have altered.”
 -Nelson Mandela


Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, politician and philanthropist who served as President of South Afrd۽^2c'︨`ica from 1994 to 1999. -Wikipedia

Born: July 18, 1918, Mvezo, South Africa
Died: December 5, 2013
396 is once again the number of payload bytes present in that string.
This is immediately followed without any separator by a filename, and another size marker:
Nelson-Mandela.jpg?14400/
then followed by all the 14400 - len(Nelson-Mandela.jpg?) + len(/) JPEG bytes bytes, starting with the two JPEG file signature byte "FF D8".
Further toplevel transaction payloads are then simply concatenated with the previous ones, until the last bytes of the image "FF D9" appears at the end of the payload.
00000430  d2 81 de 80 0c 52 f1 40  ea 29 68 03 ff d9 6f 6d  |.....R.@.)h...om|
00000440  53 65 61 20 26 20 45 4d  42 49 49 00              |Sea & EMBII.|
padded once again by an AtomSea & EMBII string fragment terminated by a NUL character.
Israel Updated 2025-07-16
What they are doing to the Palestinians is a tremendous injustice. Either give them citizenship, or give them a country.
The fact that the United States supports this is an incurable black mark in their moral standing that will not be forgotten for a very long time.
Proterozoic Updated 2025-07-16
Archean Updated 2025-07-16
Austria Updated 2025-07-16
In this example, posts have tags. When a post is deleted, we check to see if there are now any empty tags, and now we want to delete any empty tags that the post deletion may have created.
If we are creating and deleting posts concurrently, a naive implementation might wrongly delete the tags of a newly created post.
This could be due to a concurrency issue of the following types.
Failure case 1:
  • thread 2: delete old post
  • thread 2: find all tags with 0 posts. Finds tag0 from the deleted old post which is now empty.
  • thread 1: create new post, which we want to have tag tag0
  • thread 1: try to create a new tag tag0, but don't because it already exists, this is done using SQLite's INSERT OR IGNORE INTO or PostgreSQL's INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING
  • thread 1: assign tag0 to the new post by adding an entry to the join table
  • thread 2: delete all tags with 0 posts. It still sees from its previous search that tag0 is empty, and deletes it, which then cascades into the join table
which would result in the new post incorrectly not having the tag0.
Failure case 2:
  • thread 2: delete old post
  • thread 2: find all tags with 0 posts
  • thread 1: create new post
  • thread 1: try to create a new tag tag0, but don't because it already exists
  • thread 2: delete all tags with 0 posts. It still sees from its previous search that tag0 is empty, and deletes it
  • thread 1: assign tag0 to the new post
which leads to a foreign key failure, because the tag does not exist anymore when the assignment happens.
Failure case 3:
  • thread 2: delete old post
  • thread 1: create new post, which we want to have tag tag0
  • thread 1: try to create a new tag tag0, and succeed because it wasn't present
  • thread 2: find all tags with 0 posts, finds the tag that was just created
  • thread 2: delete all tags with 0 posts, deleting the new tag
  • thread 1: assign tag0 to the new post
which leads to a foreign key failure, because the tag does not exist anymore when the assignment happens.
Sample executions:
  • node --unhandled-rejections=strict ./parallel_create_delete_empty_tag.js p 9 1000 'READ COMMITTED': PostgreSQL, 9 tags, DELETE/CREATE the tag0 test tag 1000 times, use READ COMMITTED
    Execution often fails, although not always. The failure is always:
    error: insert or update on table "PostTag" violates foreign key constraint "PostTag_tagId_fkey"
    because the:
    INSERT INTO "PostTag"
    tries to insert a tag that was deleted in the other thread, as it didn't have any corresponding posts, so this is the foreign key failure.
    TODO: we've never managed to observe the failure case in which tag0 is deleted. Is it truly possible? And if not, by which guarantee?
  • node --unhandled-rejections=strict ./parallel_create_delete_empty_tag.js p 9 1000 'READ COMMITTED' 'FOR UPDATE': do a SELECT ... FOR UPDATE before trying to INSERT.
    This is likely correct and the fastest correct method according to our quick benchmarking, about 20% faster than REPEATABLE READ.
    We are just now 100% sure it is corret becase we can't find out if the SELECT in the DELETE subquery could first select some rows, which are then locked by the tag creator, and only then locked by DELETE after selection. Or does it re-evaludate the SELECT even though it is in a subquery?
  • node --unhandled-rejections=strict ./parallel_create_delete_empty_tag.js p 9 1000 'REPEATABLE READ': repeatable read
    We've never observed any failures with this level. This should likely fix the foreign key issue according to the PostgreSQL docs, since:
    • the DELETE "Post" commit cannot start to be seen only in the middle of the thread 1 transaction
    • and then if DELETE happened, the thread 1 transaction will detect it, ROLLBACK, and re-run. TODO how does it detect the need rollback? Is it because of the foreign key? It is very hard to be sure about this kind of thing, just can't find the information. Related: postgreSQL serialization failure.
  • node --unhandled-rejections=strict ./parallel_create_delete_empty_tag.js p 9 1000 'SERIALIZABLE': serializable
  • node --unhandled-rejections=strict ./parallel_create_delete_empty_tag.js p 9 1000 'NONE': magic value, don't use any transaction. Can blow up of course, since even less restrictions than READ COMMITTED
All executions use 2 threads.
Some theoretical notes:
  • Failure case 3 is averted by a READ COMMITTED transaction, because thread 2 won't see the uncommitted tag that thread 1 created, and therefore won't be able to delete it
stackoverflow.com/questions/10935850/when-to-use-select-for-update from SELECT FOR UPDATE also talks about a similar example, and has relevant answers.
Hadean Updated 2025-07-16
No life, earth too hot, until formation of water.
Jáchymov Updated 2025-07-16
"Joachimsthal" is the German for it. Note how it is just near the modern frontier between Germany and the Czech Republic.
It is from ore of this mine that Uranium and Radium were discovered.
Apparently the region was a silver mining center:
Starting in the late Middle Ages, pitchblende was extracted from the Habsburg silver mines in Joachimsthal, Bohemia (now Jáchymov in the Czech Republic), and was used as a coloring agent in the local glassmaking industry
Sinophile Updated 2025-07-16
Eindhoven Updated 2025-07-16

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