Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 696 posts.
Intel’s manuals for their x86/x64 processor clearly state that the fsin instruction (calculating the trigonometric sine) has a maximum error, in round-to-nearest mode, of one unit in the last place…
tl;dr I found a vulnerability in apt that allows a network man-in-the-middle (or a malicious package mirror) to execute arbitrary code as root on a machine i...
Asynchrony is not concurrency.
One of life's minor annoyances is having to wait on my devices to connect to the network after I wake them from sleep. All too often, I'll open the lid on my …
One of my more frequent rants, both online and in person, is the danger posed by the "fast-math" compiler flag. While these rants may elicit resigned acknowledgment from those who already understand the dangers involved, they do little to help those who don't. So given the remarkable paucity of writing on the topic…
Created by Lewis Lehe (of Setosa and UC Berkeley Trans. Eng. ) with design and art by Dennys Hess . Thanks to Ian Johnson for good advice. Tools: d3 , Angular Material , Coffeescript , Browserify , Gulp and Five-Hour Energy Drink .
After a year in development, the open source “Asahi” driver for the Apple GPU is running real games. There’s more to do, but Neverball is already playable (and a lot of fun!).
You know how sometimes if you mistype a filename in Bash, it corrects your spelling and runs the command anyway?* Such as when changing directory, or opening a file. I have an idea: Suicide Linux. Any time - any time - you type any remotely incorrect command, the interpreter cr...
With the arrival of core.async , ClojureScript provides a powerful advantage over other popular compile to JavaScript languages like CoffeeScript , Dart , and TypeScript . These languages fail to address the single largest source of incidental complexity for any sizeable client side application - concurrency. In my…
It’s widespread folklore that one advantage of garbage collection is the ease of building high-performance lock-free data structures. Manual memory management for these data structures is not easy, and a GC makes it trivial.
By Devine Lu Linvega
Introducing a new programming language.
I was finally tempted into writing this from a Hacker News discussion on “ Debian Dropping the Linux Standard Base ,” where some interest was expressed in reading an architectural critique of systemd.
As it turns out, font rendering is a highly controversial topic. If you don’t see anything wrong with Linux font rendering, please disregard this as a shitpost. Thanks.
Let me tell you about the still-not-defunct real-time log processing pipeline we built at my now-defunct last job. It handled logs from a la...
We’re going to reproduce some results from papers on filesystem robustness that were written up roughly a decade ago : Prabhakaran et al. SOSP 05 paper , which injected errors below the filesystem and Gunawi et al. FAST 08 , which looked at how often filesystems failed to check return codes of functions that can…
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
AWS EC2 Virtualization 2017: explaining the different virtualization types, from emulation and binary substitution, paravirtualization and Xen, PV, HVM, and PVHVM modes, and the new Nitro hypervisor
We’ve been lied to. They keep showing us charts where CPU speed goes up and up every year as if Moore’s Law isn’t just a historical observation but some kind of divine right. Without lifting a finger, we software folks watch our programs magically accelerate just by virtue of new hardware.
TAI times are identified by year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. There are exactly 86400 TAI seconds in every TAI day. TAI days are labelled by the Gregorian calendar.
In many large-scale web services, multiple layers of stateless and stateful services are seperated by load balancers. Load balancing can be done with dedicated hardware, with dedicated software load balancers, using DNS trickery or through a load-balancing mechanism in the client. In large systems, the resources and…
Examining the extent of AVX related downclocking on Intel’s Ice Lake CPU
Please Note: this was written January 2009 - see the comments for updates and additional information. A lot has changed since I wrote this.
Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous...
(Heads up — this article was published in October 2020. Much of the general discussion is still relevant, but many of these SoCs are getting quite long in the tooth, and some of the software issues mentioned here have been addressed)
In this post, we explore cooperative multitasking and the async/await feature of Rust. We take a detailed look at how async/await works in Rust, inclu…
