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Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic
Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 696 posts.
152
How long does it take to make a context switch? (2010)
That's a interesting question I'm willing to spend some of my time on. Someone at StumbleUpon emitted the hypothesis that with all the impr...
153
Distributed systems for fun and profit (free ebook)
git , Single page HTML , Kindle .mobi , PDF , .epub , HTML for printing , book cover .
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Measuring context switching and memory overheads for Linux threads
In this post I want to explore the costs of threads on modern Linux machines, both in terms of time and space. The background context is designing high-load concurrent servers, where using threads is one of the common schemes .
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There Is No Thread
This is an essential truth of async in its purest form: There is no thread.
156
A Million-user Comet Application with Mochiweb, Part 1
In this series I will detail what I found out empirically about how mochiweb performs with lots of open connections, and show how to build a comet application using mochiweb, where each mochiweb connection is registered with a router which dispatches messages to various users. We end up with a working application that…
157
GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
GNOME filepicker and my toilets are broken because of culture of mediocrity.
158
Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs
Design differences of containers, Zones, Jails and VMs.
159
Why is Rosetta 2 fast?
Rosetta 2 is remarkably fast when compared to other x86-on-ARM emulators. I’ve spent a little time looking at how it works, out of idle curiosity, and found it to be quite unusual, so I figur…
160
Why is a Rust executable large?
Update (2016-10-07): The official FAQ has an entry for this exact problem now. I'll leave this post as more curiously minded people.
161
The network is reliable
I’ve been discussing Jepsen and partition tolerance with Peter Bailis over the past few weeks, and I’m honored to present this post as a collaboration between the two of us. We’d also like to extend our sincere appreciation to everyone who contributed their research and experience to this piece.
162
The Performance Cost of Integer Overflow Checking
How much overhead should we expect from enabling integer overflow checks? Using a compiler flag or built-in intrinsics, we should be able to do the check with a conditional branch that branches based on the overflow flag that add and sub set. Code that looks like
163
Epoll is fundamentally broken
This time we'll focus on Linux's select(2) successor - the epoll(2) I/O multiplexing syscall.
164
A Concurrency Cost Hierarchy
Concurrent operations can be grouped relatively neatly into categories based on their cost
165
The Eternal Mainframe (2013)
The urge to replace the mainframe has reinvented the mainframe and its problems.
166
Gathering Intel on Intel AVX-512 Transitions
Investigating some details of SIMD related frequency transitions on Intel CPUs.
167
Why Create a New Unix Shell?
This post explains the project's motivation from several perspectives. Unix shell is an old and successful technology, so there are many ways of looking at it.
168
Please Use ZFS with ECC Memory (2014)
In this blogpost I argue why it's strongly recommended to use ZFS with ECC memory when building a NAS. I would argue that if you do not use ECC memory, it's reasonable to also forgo on ZFS altogether and use any (legacy) file system that suits your needs.
169
The Day The Standard Library Died
In Prague, the C++ committee took a series of polls on whether to break ABI, and decided not to. There was no applause. But I’m not sure we fully understood what we did and the consequences it could have.
170
Ubuntu on Windows -- The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers
Update: Here's how to get started using Ubuntu on Windows See also Scott Hanselman's blog here I'm in San Francisco this week, attendin...
171
Writing down (and searching through) every UUID
I couldn't remember every UUID so I wrote them all down
172
How Protothreads Really Work
What goes on behind the magical macros in the C protothreads library? Why are they macros? How do the macros work? Read on for the explanation.
173
A performance comparison of Judy to hash tables
Numerous claims about Judy's performance are made in the Judy whitepaper . I don't think any of those claims are wrong. However, it does not appear that sufficient effort was put in benchmarking Judy against other data structures. Now, it is unlikely there is another data structure that is both as fast and as small as…
174
Jepsen: On the perils of network partitions
This article is part of Jepsen , a series on network partitions. We’re going to learn about distributed consensus, discuss the CAP theorem’s implications, and demonstrate how different databases behave under partition.
175
Performance is a Feature
We’ve always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we’re performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There’s plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people
176
FreeBSD on EC2 status
For lists of FreeBSD AMI IDs, please consult the appropriate FreeBSD release announcement; you can also launch FreeBSD through the AWS Marketplace .
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Fast Software, the Best Software
Essay on the benefits of speedy software, and how it affects user perception of engineering quality and overall usability
180
Xplain – Explaining X11 for the rest of us
The goal of Explanations is to try to allow people to play with fun parts of computers. Graphics, compression, audio. The tagline is my biggest inspiration: "Play, don't show", riffing off the typical "Show, don't tell" rule of writers and authors everywhere. Why bother giving a diagram when I give you an inspector…