Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 82 posts.
Bing.com is a cloud service that runs on thousands of servers spanning many datacenters across the globe. Bing servers handle thousands of users’ queries every second from consumers around the world doing searches through their browsers, from our partners using the Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs, and from the…
I’ve spent a good deal of my professional life arguing against using protobuffers. They’re clearly written by amateurs, unbelievably ad-hoc, mired in gotchas, tricky to compile, and solve a problem that nobody but Google really has. If these problems of protobuffers remained quarantined in serialization abstractions…
Back in 2015, I wrote a popular post comparing the performance of a number of microSD cards when used with the Raspberry Pi. In the intervening three years, the marketplace hasn't changed a ton, but there have been two new revisions to the Raspberry Pi (the model 3 B and just-released model 3 B+). In that article, I…
A guide to a secure and streamlined installation of OpenBSD 6.4 on a laptop.
Have you ever run gitk and waited a few seconds before the window appears? Have you struggled to visualize your commit history into a sane order of
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
SIMD is a powerful performance technique, and is especially valuable in signal and image processing applications. I will be using it very extensively in my synthesizer, and also it’s increasingly used in xi-editor to optimize string comparisons and similar primitives.
When we switch on a computer, it goes through a series of steps before it is able to load the operating system. In this post we will see how a typical x86 processor boots. This is a very complex an…
Algolia started out as a mobile SDK for apps that wanted better offline search. After customers starting asking for a hosted search product, they quic
The only enterprise AI data platform that cuts complexity, reduces costs, and gets you to production faster.
Most strings found on the Internet are encoded using a particular unicode format called UTF-8. However, not all strings of bytes are valid UTF-8. The rules as to what constitute a valid UTF-8 string are somewhat arcane. Yet it seems important to quickly validate these strings before you consume them. In a previous…
I wrote this article for an online magazine called Scene Zine . Scene Zine caters to the Demo Scene, which is an digital art community dedicated to pushing the limits of computers through a mix of music, art, and computer programming. A particular category of demoscene productions, 4K intros, focus on the final…
You might have read that Mozilla recently switched Windows builds to clang-cl . More recently, those Windows builds have seen both PGO (Profile-Guided Optimization) and LTO (Link-Time Optimization) enabled .
Resurrecting an old tradition of this blog, let’s take a simple problem, go over a way too long list of alternative solutions, and evaluate their merits. Our simple problem is this: we want t…
January 31, 2025: Post updated to clarify the reduced on-demand pricing and workloads recommendations. Just a few years ago, creating a database that could support your business at any scale while providing consistent low latency was a daunting task. That changed for me in 2012 while reading Werner Vogels’ blog post…
CockroachDB 2.1 is 50x more scalable than Amazon Aurora at less than 2% of the price per tpmC. Read on to see performance benchmarks of CockroachDB 2.1, including the latest TPC-C results.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
