Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,232 posts.
Removing (most of) the software stack from the cloud Clive is an operating system designed to work in distributed and cloud computing environments. It’s main design guidelines are: Ther…
At Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton at the 2016 AWS re:Invent conference, I introduced the first Amazon Web Services custom silicon. The ASIC I showed formed the foundational core of our second generation custom network interface controllers and, even back in 2016, there was at least one of these ASICs going…
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.
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Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
I've been running QubesOS as my main desktop since 2015. It provides good security, by running applications in different Xen VMs. However, it is also …
This post is all about speculative compilation, or just speculation for short, in the context of the JavaScriptCore virtual machine.
When writing lock-free code in C or C++, one must often take special care to enforce correct memory ordering. Otherwise, surprising things can happen. Intel lists several such …
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
When you have to traverse some sort of a nested data structure (say, a binary tree), one approach is to create a stack that remembers where in the tree you are. Another, much more elegant approach, is to write the function recursively. A recursive function employs the machine stack used to implicitly implement…
I’m a huge fan of interactive programming (see: JavaScript , Java , Lisp , Clojure ). That is, modifying and extending a program while it’s running. For certain kinds of non-batch applications, it takes much of the tedium out of testing and tweaking during development. Until last week I didn’t know how to apply…
Here’s a fun bit of trivia: malloc on Linux never fails [due to the obvious cause]. In this post, we’ll show that this indeed is the case, and explore why…
Life doesn't freeze when winter comes—if anything, that's when riders need reliable transportation most, when being exposed to the elements becomes less appealing. Today, the Waymo Driver successfully navigates rain, fog, sandstorms, and freezing temperatures. As we expand to more cities across the U.S. and globally…
ZFS keeps winning over btrfs on many fronts. Here's a short list that explains exactly how.
1. Nobody really knows how to do it 2. If you think you have a reliable system for doing it, you're probably doing the computer's job -- "...
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…
tl;dr: Rebuilding a target because its mtime is older than the mtimes of its dependencies, like `make` does, is very error prone. redo does...
I've been looking at what would be needed in order to have a global view of CRLs in browsers. At the moment revocation has three problems: privacy (by asking the CA about the status of a certificate you're revealing to them what you're looking at), performance (OCSP checks take hundreds of milliseconds which adds up…
A while ago, I posted about ffvp9, FFmpeg's native decoder for the VP9 video codec, which significantly outperforms Google's decoder (part of libvpx). We also talked about encoding performance (quality, mainly), and showed VP9 significantly outperformed H.264, although it was much slower. The elephant-in-the-room…
