421
Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,231 posts.
422
Fast machines, slow machines
Well, that was unexpected. I recorded a couple of crappy videos in 5 minutes, posted them on a Twitter thread, and went viral with 8.8K likes at this point. I really could not have predicted that, given that I’ve been posting what-I-believe-is interesting content for years and… nothing, almost-zero interest. Now that…
423
Make LLVM Fast Again
Clang is an “LLVM native” C/C++/Objective-C compiler, which aims to deliver amazingly fast compiles […]
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Asahi Linux for M1 Macs: progress report for September 2021
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
426
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.
427
A tale of an impossible bug: big.LITTLE and caching
When someone says multi-core, we unconsciously think SMP. That worked out well for us until recently when ARM announced big.LITTLE. ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture is the first mass produced AMP architecture and as we’ll see next, it raises the bar for how hard multi-core programing is.
428
How Discord Stores Billions of Messages Using Cassandra
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
429
My business card runs Linux
Dmitry.GR: My business card runs Linux (and Ultrix), yours can too. Details, kits, etc...
430
Multiprocess Firefox
Since this January, David Anderson and I have been working on making Firefox use multiple processes. Tom Schuster (evilpie on IRC) joined us as an intern this summer, and Felipe Gomes, Mark Hammond…
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Why Create a New Unix Shell?
Please read this update instead: Why Create a New Unix Shell? (2021) . This page is obsolete!
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Arranging Invisible Icons in Quadratic Time
Near the end of January I was pointed to a twitter thread where a Windows user with a powerful machine was hitting random hangs in explorer. Lots of unscientific theories were being proposed. I don…
435
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…
436
Cooling the tube – Engineering heat out of the Underground
On a summer's day a trip in a hot tube train is a dreadful experience, but how did we end up with such hot tube trains, and what's being done about it?
437
1.1B Taxi Rides on Kdb+/q and 4 Xeon Phi CPUs
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
438
Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15
I’m working on more posts about the Catalina release, but I wanted to start with a short warning. I’ve heard a bunch of reports of data loss in Apple Mail. Thankfully, none seem to be caused by my apps . (Ironically, one of the bugs I’ve encountered is the inability to delete messages via AppleScript.) And, in fact…
439
APIs, robustness, and idempotency
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
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Intel x86 considered harmful – survey of attacks against x86 over last 10 years
Back in summer I have read a new bookpublished by one of the core Intel architects about the Management Engine (ME).I didn’t quite like what I read there. In...
442
Carving the scheduler out of our orchestrator
A deep dive into container scheduling and Flyd, our new orchestrator.
443
Serenity OS: Interview
How would you build an operating system? My answer is I wouldn't. First off, I don't know how. And the second thing is it seems like to large of a task. It took thousands of developers to build Windows XP. But actually, it is possible to build an operating system from scratch. My guest is doing it. Andreas Kling…
444
Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?
More or less anyone using modern PCs has to wonder: Why does Windows use backslash as a path separator when the rest of the world uses forward slash? The clear intermediate answer is “because DOS and OS/2 used backslash”. Both Windows 9x and NT were directly or indirectly derived from DOS and OS/2, and certainly…
445
C and C++ prioritize performance over correctness
The original ANSI C standard, C89, introduced the concept of “undefined behavior,” which was used both to describe the effect of outright bugs like accessing memory in a freed object and also to capture the fact that existing implementations differed about handling certain aspects of the language, including use of…
446
So good, it works on barbed wire (2001)
Next time you look at a transmission line, I hope you'll focus on the big four properties: characteristic impedance, high-frequency loss, delay, and cros...
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Hardware-accelerated Linux virtual machines on jailbroken iPhone 12 / iOS 14.1
I unlocked Hypervisor.framework on my jailbroken phone and modified UTM, a popular QEMU port for iOS, to run arm64 Linux in a VM at full native speed. …for the clickbait - and to show iPhone’s untapped potential.
449
Psychic Paper: iOS Sandbox Escape
Siguza’s Blog
450
Partitioning GitHub’s relational databases to handle scale
In 2019, to meet growth and availability challenges, we set a plan in motion to improve our tooling and ability to partition relational databases.