Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,231 posts.
Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in…
A while ago I did a blog post about how long DNS resolvers hold results in cache for, using RIPE Atlas probes testing against their default resolvers (in a lot of cases, the DNS cache on their modem/router).
Learn about The Merge, when Ethereum Mainnet moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in September 2022, cutting its energy use by about 99.95%.
Two months ago I have published a detailed survey of varioussecurity-related problems plaguing the Intel x86 platforms. While the picturepainted in the paper...
The new Riptide garbage collector in WebKit leads to a five-fold improvement in latency in the JetStream/splay-latency test.
People misuse queues all the time. The most egregious case being to fix issues with slow apps, and consequently, with overload. But to say why, I'll need to take bits of talks and texts I have around the place, and content that I have written in more details about in Erlang in Anger .
At CloudFlare, Nginx is at the core of what we do. It is part of the underlying foundation of our reverse proxy service. In addition to the built-in Nginx functionalities, we use an array of custom C modules...
This post describes the implementation and use of pledge() and unveil() in SerenityOS.
Part of the sales pitch for Rust is that it's "as bare metal as C". 1 Rust can do anything C can do, run anywhere C can run, 2 with code...
Note: This blog post from 2018 predates the Intel Ice Lake (Sunny Core) and AMD Zen 4 processors. These newer processors are not affected by the issues described in this blog post. Our processors typically do computations using small data stores called registers. On 64-bit processors, 64-bit registers are frequently…
The CAP theorem states a database cannot guarantee consistency, availability, and partition-tolera...
See how well you know (or can anticipate) gcc's optimizer. For each question, the left box contains some code, while the right box contains code that purports to do the same thing, but that illustrates a particular optimization. Will gcc apply that optimization? Put another way, will the code on the left be as fast as…
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 …
Algebraic effects and handlers provide a modular abstraction for expressing effectful computation, allowing the programmer to separate the expression of an effectful computation from its implementation. In this post, I will present an extension to OCaml for programming with linear algebraic effects, and demonstrate…
Or, A Heterogeneous Supercomputer in Every Pocket In the twilight of Moore’s Law, the transitions to multicore processors, GPU computing, and HaaS cloud computing are not separate trends, bu…
Welp, this is a weird blog post! Very unexpectedly, we quickly invalidated some of the core hypothesis that make Zaplib work as a startup.
I think that all other considerations are of the extrinsic real-world kind – domain modeling, usability, schedules, platforms, etc. I also think that I can show how any "good" programming practice is mainly aimed at minimizing redundancy, dependencies, or both. I even think that you can tell a "good" programmer from a…
TRESOR is a secure implementation of AES which is resistant against cold boot attacks. The basic idea behind this implementation is to store the secret key inside CPU registers rather than in RAM.
A high level walkthrough of the basics of video compression techniques used in MPEG, AVC/H.264, codecs.
I’m going to cover a lot of ground in this post, so here’s the TLDR: We built a Twitter-scale Mastodon instance from scratch in only 10k lines of code. This is 100x less code than the ~1M lines Twi…
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections . Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds , making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't…
PostgreSQL is a major open-source relational database with a 23-year history and a broad range of features. While Jepsen’s work has traditionally focused on distributed systems, our tooling is readily applicable to traditional, single-node databases. In this report, we present the results of applying Jepsen’s…
Programming with dates, times, and timezones is hard. But here's some help.
TL;DR: Starting with Firefox 48, Mozilla is shipping its first production Rust code, with more to come! Mozilla ❤ Rust It's hard to believe it's been almost seven years since ...
How a mistake of less than half a millimeter in a single part nearly brought down the world’s largest passenger aircraft.
Linux load averages explained, including why they include the uninterruptible I/O sleep state.
