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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
The teeth are not the only problem
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 79 posts.
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Arena allocator tips and tricks
Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to arena allocation . With practice, it’s effective, simple, and fast; typically as easy to use as garbage collection but without the costs. Depending on need, an allocator can weigh just 7–25 lines of code — perfect when lacking a runtime . With the core details of my own…
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Git archive checksums may change
We are reverting this change for now. More details to follow. The default compression for Git archives has recently changed. As result, archives downloaded from GitHub may have different checksums…
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Wayland on OpenBSD
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Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs
This post assumes some basic C skills. Linux puts you in full control. This is not always seen from everyone’s perspective, but a power user loves to be in control. I’m going to show yo…
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Using uninitialized memory for fun and profit (2008)
This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years, in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array. Like the best programming tricks, this one is the right tool for the job…
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Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
We’ve been working hard on making Firefox even faster and we’re extremely happy to report that this has resulted in an improvement in speed.
39
Learn x86-64 assembly by writing a GUI from scratch
Most people think assembly is only to be used to write toy programs for learning purposes, or to write a highly optimized version of a specific function inside a codebase written in a high-level language.
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Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough
Xe Iaso's personal website.
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Reptar
We have a CPU mystery! We found a way to cause some processors to enter a glitch state where the normal rules don’t apply, but what does that mean…?
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Jepsen: MySQL 8.0.34
MySQL needs little introduction. Over the last 28 years it has become one of the most widely deployed SQL databases. MySQL is primarily used for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, but is also deployed as a part of OLAP and queuing systems.
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First in-the-wild UEFI bootkit bypassing UEFI Secure Boot
ESET researchers are the first to publish an analysis of BlackLotus, the first in-the-wild UEFI bootkit capable of bypassing UEFI Secure Boot.
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Flattening ASTs and other compiler data structures
This is an introduction to data structure flattening, a special case of arena allocation that is a good fit for programming language implementations. We build a simple interpreter twice, the normal way and the flat way, and show that some fairly mechanical code changes can give you a 2.4× speedup.
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"<ESC>[31M"? ANSI Terminal security in 2023 and finding 10 CVEs
This paper reflects work done in late 2022 and 2023 to audit for vulnerabilities in terminal emulators, with a focus on open source software. The results of this work were 10 CVEs against terminal emulators that could result in Remote Code Execution (RCE), in addition various other bugs and hardening opportunities…
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Rethinking Window Management
Window management is one of those areas I'm fascinated with because even after 50 years, nobody's fully cracked it yet. Ever since the dawn of time we've relied on the window metaphor as the primary way of multitasking on the desktop. In this metaphor, each app can spawn one or more rectangular windows, which are...
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Setenv Is Not Thread Safe and C Doesn't Want to Fix It
You can't safely use the C setenv() or unsetenv() functions in a program that uses threads. Those functions modify global state, and can cause other threads calling getenv() to crash. This also causes crashes in other languages that use those C standard library functions, such as Go's os.Setenv ( Go issue ) and Rust's…
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Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
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Hotspot performance engineering fails
Developers often believe that software performance follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the running time is spent in 20% of the code. Using this model, you can write most of your code without any care for performance and focus on the narrow pieces of code that are performance sensitive. Engineers like Casey Muratori…
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Optimizing a ring buffer for throughput (2021)
In this article I will take a look at the classic concurrent ring buffer and how it can be optimized to increase throughput.
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Load Balancing
A bottom-up, animated guide to HTTP load balancing algorithms.
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Paving the Road to Vulkan on Asahi Linux
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
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The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux
Note: If you're here because you just want to watch Netflix on Asahi, install this (Edit: for Arch users, grab this . Fedora users can install the widevine-installer package), and then scroll down to the "Netflix-Specific Annoyances" section.
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Zero downtime Postgres upgrades
How we upgraded from Postgres 11.9 to 15.3 with zero downtime
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FreeBSD on Firecracker
A large amount of fantastic open source software originates from “scratching an itch”. Such was the case with Firecracker . In 2014, Amazon launched AWS Lambda as a “serverless” compute platform: Users can provide a function — say, ten lines of Python code — and Lambda provides all of the infrastructure between an…
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Android and RISC-V: What you need to know to be ready
You can build, test, and run the Android support for RISC-V on your own machine.
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How RocksDB Works
Over the past years, the adoption of RocksDB increased dramatically. It became a standard for embeddable key-value stores.
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Text showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes
I have been working on a hobby project to reimagine the C core of Emacs in Rust. On this journey, I reached the point where I needed some way to represent the text of a buffer. The simplest approach is to just use a large string or array of lines. However these each suffer from poor performance as either the size or…
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How much memory do you need to run 1M concurrent tasks?
In this blog post, I delve into the comparison of memory consumption between asynchronous and multi-threaded programming across popular languages like Rust, ...