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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 102 posts.
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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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How We Knew It Was Time to Leave the Cloud
How we're solving storage and performance issues as we scale.
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H.264 is Magic
A high level walkthrough of the basics of video compression techniques used in MPEG, AVC/H.264, codecs.
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Shipping Rust code in Firefox
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 ...
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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.
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How to Compromise the Enterprise Endpoint
Posted by Tavis Ormandy.Symantec is a popular vendor in the enterprise security market, their fla...
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DTrace for Linux 2016
DTrace for Linux 2016: announcing a major milestone: the final kernel capabilities have merged in Linux 4.9-rc1 to enhanced BPF (eBPF) to provide an advanced programmable dynamic tracer similar to DTrace.
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The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem (2010)
When Windows NT was first being developed, one of the goals was to make the kernel separate from the programming interface. NT was originally intended to be the successor to OS/2 but Microsoft also…
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Robin Hood Hashing should be the default hash table implementation (2013)
There’s a neat variation on open-addressing based hash tables called Robin Hood hashing . This technique isn’t very well-known, but it makes a huge practical difference because it both improves performance and space utilization compared to other “standard” hash tables (e.g. chaining ). It also eliminates the major…
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Jepsen: RethinkDB 2.2.3 reconfiguration
In the previous Jepsen analysis of RethinkDB , we tested single-document reads, writes, and conditional writes, under network partitions and process pauses. RethinkDB did not exhibit any nonlinearizable histories in those tests. However, testing with more aggressive failure modes, on both 2.1.5 and 2.2.3, has…
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A bug story: data alignment on x86
This sounds unusual. Who ever wants to do this in real life? Normally, we only see code like this as primary school assignments or compiler benchmarks. However, this time it happened in real life.
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Why do Windows functions begin with a pointless MOV EDI, EDI instruction? (2011)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Inside the Magic Pocket
Dash knows your context, your team, and your work, so your team can stay organized, easily find and share knowledge, and keep projects secure, all from one place.
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ZFS Licensing and Linux
We at Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the industry’s leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS.And in doing so, we have concluded that we are acting within the r […]
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Docker in Production: A History of Failure
Introduction My first encounter with docker goes back to early 2015. Docker was experimented with to find out whether it could benefit us. At the time it wasn’t possible to run a container [i…
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PostgreSQL Scalability: Towards Millions TPS
PostgreSQL scalability on multicore and multisocket machines became a subject of optimization long time ago once such machines became widely used. This blog post shows brief history of vertical scalability improvements between versions 8.0 and 8.4. PostgreSQL 9.2 had very noticeable scalability improvement. Thanks to…
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Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013)
I’ve been thinking about the lessons distributed systems engineers learn on the job. A great deal of our instruction is through scars made by mistakes made in production traffic. These scars are useful reminders, sure, but it’d be better to have more engineers with the full count of their fingers.
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The Majestic Monolith
Monolith by Rene Aigner Some patterns are just about the code. If your code looks like this, and you need it to do that, here’s what to do. You’d do well to study such patterns, as they give you a …
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Why is Python slow
In case you missed it, Marius recently wrote a post on the Pyston blog about our baseline JIT tier. Our baseline JIT sits between our interpreter tier and our LLVM JIT tier, providing better speed…
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A FreeBSD 10 Desktop How-To
A guide to a full-featured modern desktop FreeBSD installation
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Erlang Scheduler Details and Why They Matter
Hamidreza Soleimani's Blog - Just about what I know
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How many x86 instructions are there?
It’s surprisingly hard to give a good answer (the question was raised in this article). It depends on how you count, and the details are interesting (to me anyway). To not leave you hanging: …