Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 67 posts.
Compression efficiency with shared dictionaries in Chrome
Compression on the web is getting a big boost from shared dictionary compression. Learn what they are, how they work, and how they could substantially reduce load times even further than standard compression for both static and dynamic resources on the web.
Building a baseline JIT for Lua automatically (2023)
This is the Part 2 of a series. Feel free to read the prequel for more context: Building the fastest Lua interpreter automatically Building a good VM for a dynamic language takes a ton of engineerin
A small Rust binary indeed (2022)
Can we make a Rust program that's as small as it's assembler equivalent?
Booting Linux off of Google Drive
Competitiveness is a vice of mine. When I heard that a friend got Linux to boot off of NFS, I had to one-up her. I had to prove that I could create...
MVCC – the part of PostgreSQL we hate the most (2023)
As much as Andy loves PostgreSQL, there is one part that is terrible and causes many headaches for people. Learn what it is and why it sucks.
It Can Be Done (2003)
A story about quality from the development of the Multics operating system.
macOS 14.4 causes JVM crashes
Java users on macOS 14 running on Apple silicon systems should consider delaying the macOS 14.4 update
Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian
Around a decade ago, I was happy to learn about bcache – a Linux block cache system that implements tiered storage (like a pool of hard disks with SSDs for cache) on Linux. At that stage, ZFS on Linux was nowhere close to where it is today, so any progress on gaining more ZFS features in general Linux systems was very…
ARM64EC (and ARM64X) Explained
ARM64EC (and ARM64X) Explained Probably the most confused looks I get from other developers when I discuss Windows and ARM64 is when I used the term " ARM64EC ". They ask is the same thing as ARM64? Is it a different instruction set than ARM64? How can you tell if an application is or ARM64 ARM64EC?
GPUs Go Brrr
how make gpu fast?
Sudo for Windows
Introducing Sudo for Windows We're excited to announce the release of Sudo for Windows in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052! Sudo for Windows is a
Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases
Apple uses Cassandra and FoundationDB for CloudKit, their cloud backend service. We take a look into how exactly each is used within their cloud and the problems they've solved.
Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel
By all accounts, Pat Gelsinger is affable, technically sharp, hard-working, and decent. Those who have worked for him praise him as a singularly good manager. In January 2021, when Gelsinger was abruptly named the CEO of Intel, this is more or less all I knew of him — and I found myself urgently needing to learn much…
Ceph: A Journey to 1 TiB/s
Ceph is an open source distributed storage system designed to evolve with data.
Flipping Pages: New Linux vulnerability in nf_tables and exploitation techniques
A tale about exploiting KernelCTF Mitigation, Debian, and Ubuntu instances with a double-free in nf_tables in the Linux kernel, using novel techniques like Dirty Pagedirectory. All without even having to recompile the exploit for different kernel targets once.
Visualizing algorithms for rate limiting
Smudge.ai is a Chrome extension that gives you ChatGPT-powered shortcuts in your right-click menu.
Databases and why their complexity is now unnecessary
This post is not going to be about what’s wrong with individual databases. There are so many databases and so many individual API issues, operational problems, and arbitrary limitations that it wou…
Let's compile like it's 1992 (2014)
I have been tinkering with the vanilla source code of Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. Even though it is more than 20 years old and has rotten for modern systems, you can still compile it if you recreate the environment. All you need is :
Sourcehut network outage post-mortem
sourcehut is a network of useful open source tools for software project maintainers and collaborators, including git repos, bug tracking, continuous integration, and mailing lists.
The Billion Row Challenge (1BRC) – Step-by-Step from 71s to 1.7s
A step-by-step walkthrough of the Billion Row Challenge, taking a Parallel Java Streams aggregation from 71 seconds down to 1.7 with SIMD and tuning.
A lock-free ring-buffer with contiguous reservations (2019)
Building a lock free continuous ring buffer
Traceroute Isn't Real
Almost nobody understands how traceroute works. Worse, it's not a real tool
Rustgo: Calling Rust from Go with near-zero overhead (2017)
Go has good support for calling into assembly, and a lot of the fast cryptographic code in the stdlib is carefully optimized assembly, bringing speedups of over 20 times.
A transport protocol's view of Starlink
How TCP interacts with the characteristics of the Starlink service.
Do low-level optimizations matter? Faster quicksort with cmov (2020)
Collectively, we have been thinking about sorting for longer than we have had computers. There is still an active literature 1 , 2 , 3 . We are taught that how the counts of comparisons and swaps vary with problem size is what matters: as problems get bigger, order dominates, and anything else is buried in the noise…
Hyperlight: Virtual machine-based security for functions at scale
The Microsoft Azure Core Upstream team is excited to announce the Hyperlight project, an open-source Rust library you can use to create very small VMs for embedded functions. Learn more.
What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)
In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research” . Here are his opinions from 1999 on "what worked".