Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 696 posts.
A few months ago I saw a blog post touting fancy new SSE3 functions for implementing vector floor, ceil, and round functions. There was the inevitable proud proclaiming of impressive performance an…
Ever since the iPhone 5S was announced a couple of weeks ago , the world of tech journalism has been filled with massive quantities of misinformation . Unfortunately, good information takes time, and the world of tech journalism is more about speed than accuracy. Today, as suggested by a variety of readers, I'm going…
Minimodem can play and capture audio modem tones in real-time via the system audio device, or in batched mode via audio files.
I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006. The most frustrating year of those seven was the ...
This post covers Elasticsearch 1.1.0. In the months since its publication, Elasticsearch has added a comprehensive overview of correctness issues and their progress towards fixing some of these bugs.
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
This is #2 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture.Previous post (#1): Stack Overflow: The Architecture - 2016 EditionNext post (#3...
We use MySQL for storing all of the data in FriendFeed . Our database has grown a lot as our user base has grown. We now store over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.
This page is a slice of the history of concurrent programming, focusing on one particular lineage of Hoare's language of communicating sequential processes (CSP) [1] [1a] . Concurrent programming in this style is interesting for reasons not of efficiency but of clarity. That is, it is a widespread mistake to think…
My blog post on falling in love with Rust got quite a bit of attention – with many being surprised by what had surprised me as well: the high performance of my naive Rust versus my (putatively less naive?) C. However, others viewed it as irresponsible to report these performance differences, believing that these…
As part of the research for my book , I came across an algorithm called Redlock on the Redis website. The algorithm claims to implement fault-tolerant distributed locks (or rather, leases [1]) on top of Redis, and the page asks for feedback from people who are into distributed systems. The algorithm instinctively set…
There certainly is one thing that most Linux users don't realize about their Linux systems... this is the lack of GUI-level isolation, and ...
Continuing this week’s “making an article so I don’t have to keep typing it” ZFS series… here’s why you should stop using RAIDZ, and start using mirror vdevs instead.
Previously on Jepsen , we introduced the problem of network partitions . Here, we demonstrate that a few transactions which “fail” during the start of a partition may have actually succeeded.
As I was listening to Anil talk about daemons spawning processes and sysadmins killing them, I thought, "What a great user interface!" Imagine running around with a shotgun blowing away your daemons and processes, never needing to type kill -9 again.
This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. To make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by in-line text (the talk has ~120 slides; at an average of 20 kB per slide, that's 2.4 MB. If you think that's trivial…
Whenever I see code that asks what the native byte order is, it's almost certain the code is either wrong or misguided. And if the native b...
Making performant dynamic manual memory management in C feel almost like garbage collection.
XTS is the de-facto standard disk encryption mode, which makes it look like a good general-purpose one. It isn't. What disk encryption actually promises, and why XTS's guarantees don't travel.
Keeping two or more copies of the same document synchronized with each other in real-time is a complex challenge. This paper describes the differential synchronization algorithm. Differential synchronization offers scalability, fault-tolerance, and responsive collaborative editing across an unreliable network.
