1
Welcome to Gas Town
Happy New Year, and Welcome to Gas Town!
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 14 posts.
2
Flawed routers flood University of Wisconsin internet time server (2003)
ABSTRACT In May 2003, the University of Wisconsin - Madison found that it was the recipient of a continuous large scale flood of inbound Internet traffic destined for one of the campus' public Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers. The flood traffic rate was hundreds-of-thousands of packets-per-second, and hundreds of…
3
Debunking Zswap and Zram Myths
zswap and zram are fundamentally different approaches with different philosophies. If in doubt, use zswap.
4
Things Unix can do atomically (2010)
This is a catalog of things UNIX-like/POSIX-compliant operating systems can do atomically, making them useful as building blocks for thread-safe and multi-process-safe programs without mutexes or read/write locks. The list is by no means exhaustive and I expect it to be updated frequently for the foreseeable future.
5
Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)
macOS Internals Deep Dive Building a Development Kernel Collection Configuring our Mac to boot the Development Kernel Collection Putting our machine to work! When did Apple grace us with this feature? Undoing our work for OS updates Closing Thoughts
6
Permacomputing
By Devine Lu Linvega
7
The session you cannot take with you
Inference APIs are filling sessions with encrypted reasoning, hidden search results, opaque compaction, and encrypted subagent messages. A growing form of lock-in.
8
Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)
In this article I will introduce a new command line search tool, ripgrep , that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw performance of GNU grep. ripgrep is fast, cross platform (with binaries available for Linux, Mac and Windows) and written in Rust .
9
Everyone should know SIMD
SIMD has a reputation for being complex. I've met many very good software engineers who dismiss it as something too complex to learn or a niche optimization meant for only the highest-performance software, not useful in everyday programming.
10
Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak
A few months ago, users started reporting that Ghostty was consuming absurd amounts of memory, with one user reporting 37 GB after 10 days of uptime. Today, I'm happy to say the fix has been found and merged . This post is an overview of what caused the leak, a look at some of Ghostty's internals, and some brief…
11
Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager
Traditional Wayland compositors have a monolithic architecture that combines the compositor and window manager into a single program. This has the downside of requiring Wayland window managers to do the significant work of implementing an entire Wayland compositor as well.
12
What even is an OS now?
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
13
macOS's Little-Known Command-Line Sandboxing Tool (2025)
AVAILABLE NOW OpenAI, Anthropic, and Chrome ship it. Apple deprecated it. Nobody documented it. Until now. → sandbox-exec: The Miss...
14
SpacetimeDB: a short technical review
This blog post has been archived! SpacetimeDB has improved a lot since I initially published this technical review, and most of the technical details in it no longer apply.