Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 696 posts.
The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and hasbeen in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing,jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to anend. This post briefly desc...
SIMD has a reputation for being complex. I've met many very good software engineers who dismiss it as something too complex to learn or a niche optimization meant for only the highest-performance software, not useful in everyday programming.
Note: If you're here because you just want to watch Netflix on Asahi, install this (Edit: for Arch users, grab this . Fedora users can install the widevine-installer package), and then scroll down to the "Netflix-Specific Annoyances" section.
Two weeks ago, we released Firefox Quantum to the world. It’s been a big moment for Mozilla, shaping up to be a blockbuster release that’s changing how peopl...
A few months ago, users started reporting that Ghostty was consuming absurd amounts of memory, with one user reporting 37 GB after 10 days of uptime. Today, I'm happy to say the fix has been found and merged . This post is an overview of what caused the leak, a look at some of Ghostty's internals, and some brief…
Why does it take 2 years to realise that macOS has been checking signing certificate validity online?
December 2020 Update: Lo and behold, the Pi Foundation tacitly acknowledges the Pi needs a fan in the official case, because now they sell the Case Fan! The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pi 4 announcement blog post touted the Pi 4 as providing "PC-like level of performance for most users". The Foundation even offers a…
This article is not intended to convince you to abandon your current antivirus solutions. In this post I would like to share my observations and ways to improve the effectiveness of Defender. You don’
I got a call that on newer hardware some performance regression tests have become slower. Not a big deal. Usually it is a bad configuration somewhere in Windows or some BIOS settings were set to no…
Update: Note that the capture method I use needs to read pixels back from the GPU which can be slow. This means the Windows 10 results are probably worse than they should be. However, without external hardware this seems to be the only way to measure keyboard to screen latency.
By segregating macOS background tasks on Efficiency cores, M1 Macs can run user apps unfettered on their Performance cores. And that feels really fast.
By now, everyone knows that something “big” just got announced regarding computer security. Heck, when the Daily Mail does a report on it …
X11 client and server. DOS. Windows 3.1. All with preemptive multitasking.
Apple uses Cassandra and FoundationDB for CloudKit, their cloud backend service. We take a look into how exactly each is used within their cloud and the problems they've solved.
Microservices are a thing these days.
A generalised solution to distributed consensus Howard & Mortier, arXiv’19 This is a draft paper that Heidi Howard recently shared with the world via Twitter, and here’s the accompanying …
I've used Linux containers directly and indirectly for years, but I wanted to become more familiar with them. So I wrote some code. This used to be 500 lines of code, I swear, but I've revised it some since publishing; I've ended up with about 70 lines more.
By all accounts, Pat Gelsinger is affable, technically sharp, hard-working, and decent. Those who have worked for him praise him as a singularly good manager. In January 2021, when Gelsinger was abruptly named the CEO of Intel, this is more or less all I knew of him — and I found myself urgently needing to learn much…
Seeing a program you wrote running directly on the bare metal is deeply satisfying to anyone who enjoys writing software. And it turns out that creating such a program from scratch is easier than it sounds. The hardest part is figuring out where to start. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to write, build and run the…
A tale about exploiting KernelCTF Mitigation, Debian, and Ubuntu instances with a double-free in nf_tables in the Linux kernel, using novel techniques like Dirty Pagedirectory. All without even having to recompile the exploit for different kernel targets once.
I run FreeBSD as my daily driver on both my main workstation and on all my servers and I have been running FreeBSD since about 1999 because I consider it an amazing operating system. In this article I will address some of the technical reasons for choosing FreeBSD over a GNU/Linux distribution.
This post describes how to write a simple Hello world bootloader
... in which we check if your password has been compromised in many inconvenient ways, in a tale of destruction, obsession, and self-discovery.
A tutorial on how to write a Unix shell in C.
Rust claims to enable abstraction without overhead. How does that claim hold up in practice?
