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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 696 posts.
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Traceroute Isn't Real
Almost nobody understands how traceroute works. Worse, it's not a real tool
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Turning the database inside-out (2015)
Databases are global, shared, mutable state. That’s the way it has been since the 1960s, and no amount of NoSQL has changed that. However, most self-respecting developers have got rid of mutable global variables in their code long ago. So why do we tolerate databases as they are?
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How fast is AMP really?
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
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HFS+ Bit Rot
HFS+ is a terribly old filesystem with serious flaws. I sincerely hope that Apple comes with an update of the filesystem for WWDC 2015. After all they have been working on Swift for the past 4 years and we have just learned about it last week. HFS+ is seriously old HFS+ was released in 1998, in the era of Mac OS…
606
Learn Wayland by writing a GUI from scratch
Wayland is all the rage those days. Distributions left and right switch to it, many readers of my previous article on writing a X11 GUI from scratch in x86_64 assembly asked for a follow-up article about Wayland, and I now run Wayland on my desktop. So here we go, let's write a (very simple) GUI program with Wayland…
607
The July Galileo Outage: What happened and why
By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl This post is an excerpt of a far longer post on Galileo, its structures and the cause of the outage. Here we’ll only focus on the outage - the potential underlying reasons behind it are described in the full article. Since the week-long outage in July I’ve been fascinated by Galileo…
608
Rustgo: Calling Rust from Go with near-zero overhead (2017)
Go has good support for calling into assembly, and a lot of the fast cryptographic code in the stdlib is carefully optimized assembly, bringing speedups of over 20 times.
609
POSIX close(2) is broken
There's just one small problem: The way POSIX has defined close(2) is completely and utterly broken.
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Shipping a compiler every six weeks
This blog post is a slightly edited version of the live transcript of the talk I gave at RustFest 2019 in Barcelona on November 10th, 2019. As it's a transcript some parts of it are a bit repetitive or badly worded, but I hope the message behind the talk will be conveyed by this post anyway.
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Towards fearless SIMD
SIMD is a powerful performance technique, and is especially valuable in signal and image processing applications. I will be using it very extensively in my synthesizer, and also it’s increasingly used in xi-editor to optimize string comparisons and similar primitives.
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A Magnetized Needle and a Steady Hand
Now they’ve gone an done it. An unidentified agency has spread a potent computer virus across all the world’s computers and deleted the binaries for every copy of every software development tool. Even the offline copies — it’s that potent.
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How Does an Intel Processor Boot?
When we switch on a computer, it goes through a series of steps before it is able to load the operating system. In this post we will see how a typical x86 processor boots. This is a very complex an…
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The time has come to replace file systems
The time has come to replace file systems!
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Do low-level optimizations matter? Faster quicksort with cmov (2020)
Collectively, we have been thinking about sorting for longer than we have had computers. There is still an active literature 1 , 2 , 3 . We are taught that how the counts of comparisons and swaps vary with problem size is what matters: as problems get bigger, order dominates, and anything else is buried in the noise…
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You can list a directory containing 8M files, but not with ls
I needed to list all files in a directory, but ls , find , and os.listdir all hung. This is my story.
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Stripped-down Kubernetes on the Raspberry Pi
Join me as I test-drive the smallest ever Kubernetes distribution k3s. Find out how this runs on Raspberry Pi compared to kubeadm with Docker.
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Anatomy of a Linux DNS Lookup
Since I work a lot with clustered VMs , I’ve ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out how DNS lookups work. I applied ‘fixes’ to my problems from StackOverflow without really understanding why they work (or don’t work) for some time.
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Parsing JSON faster with Intel AVX-512
Many recent Intel processors benefit from a new family of instructions called AVX-512. These instructions operate over wide registers (up to 512 bits) and follow the Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) paradigm. These new AVX-512 instructions allow you to break some speed records, such as decoding base64 data at…
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A deep dive into Multicore OCaml garbage collector
I recently gave a talk on the internals of multicore OCaml GC at Jane Street offices in NYC. The slides from the talk are available online . But I felt that the slides alone aren’t particularly edifying. This post is basically the slides from the talk annotated with notes.
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Using TLA+ in the Real World to Understand a Glibc Bug
TLA+ is a formal specification language that you can use to verify programs. It’s different from other formal verification systems in that it’s very pragmatic. Instead of writing proofs…
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The GPU Banana Stand
Freshly whipped WebGPU, with ice cream
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How Spotify Works
Synthpop and sci-fi