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Links for 2018-01-17

  • Boost your immunity: Cold and flu treatments suppress innate immune system

    The next time you feel a cold coming on, maybe what you really want is just a little teensy bit of innate immune suppression, not an immunity boost. Over-the-counter medications like ibuprofen and antihistamines should help you feel better. Meanwhile, sit back while your acquired B and T cells do the rest. And if you aren’t yet sick, stay up-to-date on your vaccines, including the yearly influenza vaccine. Most importantly, practice vigorous hand washing — after all, the skin is also a component of your natural defenses and one that actually can be enhanced by good hygiene. Take care of yourself by keeping a balanced diet, maintaining good sleep habits, and minimizing stress. These are interventions that have been shown to help keep your immune system at its best. These alone can “boost” your odds of staving off an infection this cold season.

    (tags: immunity health immune-system colds b-cells t-cells flu)

  • Sarah Jeong’s hilarious Twitter thread on Bitcoin

    “People are sick of the Federal Reserve, sick of bailouts, sick of inflation. You know what we need? Internet money with the usability of PGP and the reliability of BART” and much, much more

    (tags: bitcoin funny sarah-jeong comedy lols pgp twitter threads)

  • How To Measure the Working Set Size on Linux

    A nifty metric:

    The Working Set Size (WSS) is how much memory an application needs to keep working. Your app may have populated 100 Gbytes of main memory, but only uses 50 Mbytes each second to do its job. That’s the working set size. It is used for capacity planning and scalability analysis. You may never have seen WSS measured by any tool (I haven’t either). OSes usually show you virtual memory and resident memory, shown as the “VIRT” and “RES” columns in top. Resident memory is real memory: main memory that has been allocated and page mapped. But we don’t know how much of that is in heavy use, which is what WSS tells us. In this post I’ll introduce some new things I’ve developed for WSS estimation: two Linux tools, and WSS profile charts. The tools use either the referenced or the idle page flags to measure a page-based WSS, and were developed out of necessity for another performance problem.
    (via Amy Tobey)

    (tags: via:amytobey memory linux rss wss proc ps processes metrics working-set-size ram)