Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 536 posts.
Every once in a while I run into an obscure computer technology that is a hidden gem, which over the years has become mostly forgotten. This is exactly how I feel about the tcpdump tool and its kernel counterpart the packet filter interface.
This is for people who want to understand how programs get loaded under linux. In particular it talks about dynamically loaded x86 ELF files. The information you learn will let you understand how to debug problems that occur in your program before main starts up. Everything I tell you is true, but some things will be…
The Qubes OS project has been around for nearly 8 years now, since its original announcement back in April 2010 (and the actual origin date can be traced back to November 11th, 2009, when an initial email introducing this project was sent within ITL internally). Over these years Qubes h...
CockroachDB uses RocksDB for its storage engine because of RocksDB's rich feature set, which is necessary for a complex product like a distributed SQL database.
At Mozilla, we want the web to be capable of running high-performance applications so that users and content authors can choose the safety, agency, and openness of the web platform. ...
With the recent announcement of a commercial game shipping using Emscripten and asm.js , I thought it’d be a good time to explain how asm.js is executed in Firefox and some of the load-time optimizations we’ve made since the initial landing of OdinMonkey in March. (OdinMonkey is an optimization module inside Mozilla’s…
Regular expressions – commonly known as RegExps – are a powerful and heavily used tool for manipulating strings in JavaScript. This post describes how we updated the RegExp engine in ...
About a year ago the PostgreSQL community discovered that fsync (on Linux and some BSD systems) may not work the way we always thought it is, with possibly disastrous consequences for data durability/consistency (which is something the PostgreSQL community really values).
In the process of writing a short introduction to RISC-V, we compared RISC-V vector code to SIMD. We were struck by the insidiousness of the SIMD instruction extensions of ARM, MIPS, and x86. We de…
Today we’re launching Amazon Time Sync Service, a time synchronization service delivered over Network Time Protocol (NTP) which uses a fleet of redundant satellite-connected and atomic clocks in each region to deliver a highly accurate reference clock. This service is provided at no additional charge and is…
In a recent blog post we explained how to tweak a simple UDP application to maximize throughput. This time we are going to optimize our UDP application for latency. Fighting with latency is a great excuse to discuss modern features of multiqueue NICs.
asm.js is an easy-to-optimize subset of JavaScript. It runs in all browsers without plugins, and is a good target for porting C/C++ codebases such as game engines - which have ...
Learn how the engineering team at Asana rewrote the Asana app to improve app performance and speed from an in-depth, technical perspective.
Our customers reasonably expect to be able to spend on their card, make bank transfers and pay their bills 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Their lives don’t have downtime for maintenance so nor should we. We dedicate a lot of our engineering effort to minimise the risk of downtime during technical migrations and…
At the 2016 GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced the new NVIDIA Tesla P100, the most advanced accelerator ever built. Based on the new NVIDIA Pascal GP100 GPU and…
Deepening watsonx capabilities to address enterprise gen AI data needs with DataStax.
Wayland is still lacking proper consideration for color management & support for high dynamic range (HDR) imagery. However, a group of renegade devs has begun an effort to fix this situation.
2019-09-05: YugaByte’s blog post states YugaByte DB “passes Jepsen tests”. We feel obligated to state that YugaByte DB’s Jepsen test suite does not pass, though it may in the future. Race conditions in YugaByte DB’s schema system can cause correctness errors. For example, inserting rows into a freshly-created table…
Ways of dealing with the fractured address space.
polkit is a system service installed by default on many Linux distributions. It’s used by systemd, so any Linux distribution that uses systemd also uses polkit.
