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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
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,231 posts.
332
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…
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Intel Underestimates Error Bounds by 1.3 Quintillion
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…
335
Remote code execution vulnerability in apt/apt-get
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...
336
The Bytecode Alliance: Building a secure, composable future for WebAssembly
Lin Clark introduces the Bytecode Alliance, and uses Code Cartoon illustrations to share their vision of a WebAssembly ecosystem that is secure by default, fixing cracks in today’s software foundations. ...
337
Zig's New Async I/O
Asynchrony is not concurrency.
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Rapid DHCP: Or, how do Macs get on the network so fast?
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 …
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JIT-Less V8
V8 v7.4 supports JavaScript execution without allocating executable memory at runtime.
340
Beware of Fast-Math
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…
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Why Do Buses Bunch?
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 .
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Under the hood: Facebook’s cold storage system
Visit the post for more.
343
Clip control on the Apple GPU
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!).
344
Suicide Linux
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...
345
Communicating Sequential Processes
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…
346
Introduction to ARM Assembly Basics
Welcome to this tutorial series on ARM assembly basics. This is the preparation for the followup tutorial series on ARM exploit development . Before we can dive into creating ARM shellcode and build ROP chains, we need to cover some ARM Assembly basics first.
347
Lock freedom without garbage collection in Rust
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.
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Performance Improvements in .NET 7
.NET 7 is fast. Really fast. This post deep-dives into hundreds of performance improvements that contributed to that reality.
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Uxn is a virtual machine with 32 instructions
By Devine Lu Linvega
350
Austral: A systems language with linear types and capabilities
Introducing a new programming language.
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Structural and semantic deficiencies in the systemd architecture
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.
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Towards the next generation of XNU memory safety: kalloc_type
Improving software memory safety is a key security objective for engineering teams across the industry. Here we begin a journey into the XNU kernel at the core of iOS and explore the intricate work our engineering teams have done to harden the memory allocator and make our software much more difficult to exploit.
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The sad state of font rendering on Linux
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.
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Surpassing 10Gb/S over Tailscale
Discover how Tailscale achieved over 10Gb/s throughput on Linux using advanced UDP segmentation and checksum optimizations. Explore benchmarks, results, and the innovations powering wireguard go's latest performance leap.
357
JIT-optimized Ruby can outperform a C extension
YJIT’s ability to improve performance by adapting to run-time behavior can increase the speed of our code in a way that dropping down to C can’t. As such, I think we should reconsider the common wisdom that “rewriting our Ruby in C” is the ideal path to performance optimization and take a serious look at “rewriting…
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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...
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Filesystem error handling
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…