1
Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 69 posts.
2
3
4
There are only four billion floats, so test them all (2014)
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…
5
ZFS: Use mirror vdevs, not RAIDZ
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.
6
7
Systemd, ten years later: a historical and technical retrospective
10 years ago, systemd was announced and swiftly rose to become one of the most persistently controversial and polarizing pieces of software in recent history, and especially in the GNU/Linux world. The quality and nature of debate has not improved in the least from the major flame wars around 2012-2014, and systemd…
8
On Abandoning the X Server
There's been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feed...
9
A Concurrency Cost Hierarchy
Concurrent operations can be grouped relatively neatly into categories based on their cost
10
Gathering Intel on Intel AVX-512 Transitions
Investigating some details of SIMD related frequency transitions on Intel CPUs.
11
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.
12
A log/event processing pipeline you can't have (2019)
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...
13
Ice Lake AVX-512 Downclocking
Examining the extent of AVX related downclocking on Intel’s Ice Lake CPU
14
So you want to build an embedded Linux system?
(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)
15
Writing an OS in Rust: Async/Await
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…
16
An Introduction to Lock-Free Programming (2012)
Lock-free programming is a challenge, not just because of the complexity of the task itself, but because of how difficult it can be to penetrate the subject in the first place. I …
17
Make LLVM Fast Again
Clang is an “LLVM native” C/C++/Objective-C compiler, which aims to deliver amazingly fast compiles […]
18
Async Python is not faster
Async Python is slower than "sync" Python under a realistic benchmark. A bigger worry is that async frameworks go a bit wobbly under load.
19
Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
For the last few years, Microsoft has stated during event keynotes and in other places that Linux is a rapidly growing operating system (OS) being used within Microsoft Azure. They had proudly stat…
20
Psychic Paper: iOS Sandbox Escape
Siguza’s Blog
21
22
23
MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
In episode 379 of ATP both Marco Arment and John Siracusa described noticeable delays and stalls after upgrading to macOS 10.15.
24
25
26
We chose Java for our high-frequency trading application
In the world of High-Frequency Trading, automated applications process hundreds of millions of market signals every day and send back…
27
Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines
It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at 350 MHz or faster as early as 1998. This led to some acrimony when Microsoft attempted to charge $35 for the…
28
Against Essential and Accidental Complexity
In the classic 1986 essay, No Silver Bullet , Fred Brooks argued that there is, in some sense, not that much that can be done to improve programmer productivity. His line of reasoning is that programming tasks contain a core of essential/conceptual 1 complexity that's fundamentally not amenable to attack by any…
29
Libinput's bus factor is 1 (2019)
A few weeks back, I was at XDC and gave a talk about various current and past input stack developments (well, a subset thereof anyway). On...
30
IPv4, IPv6, and a sudden change in attitude
A few years ago I wrote [_The World in Which IPv6 was a Good Design_](https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810). I'm still proud of that article, bu...