Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 36 posts.
"I'm going to beat grep by thirty percent!" I confidently crow to anyone who would listen, those foolish enough to enter my office. And my girlfriend too, who's contractually obligated to pay attention to everything I say.
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Recently, while idly browsing through the source code of Python, I came upon an interesting comment in the bytecode VM implementation ( Python/ceval.c ) about using the computed gotos extension of GCC [1] . Driven by curiosity, I decided to code a simple example to evaluate the difference between using a computed goto…
We use MySQL for storing all of the data in FriendFeed . Our database has grown a lot as our user base has grown. We now store over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.
Whenever I see code that asks what the native byte order is, it's almost certain the code is either wrong or misguided. And if the native b...
There, that's known as a teaser. You see it in television all the time. "Find out which common household plant devours pets at night... but first ." And then you have to sit through and watch the stuff about Brad and Angelina shacking up / Shaq driving his new Hummer / Hummer's new fragrance before they get to the…
XScreenSaver 5.15 is out now. Along with the usual set of minor improvements, this version runs as an iOS application. As all of the 3D modules in XScreenSaver are written against the OpenGL 1.3 specification, and as the iPhone only supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and newer, this was something of a big deal. I accomplished…
When we started working on Basecamp Next last year, we had much internal debate about whether we should evolve the existing code base or rewrite it. I’ll dive more into that debate further in a later post, but one of the key arguments for a rewrite was that we wanted a dramatic leap forward i…
At CloudFlare, Nginx is at the core of what we do. It is part of the underlying foundation of our reverse proxy service. In addition to the built-in Nginx functionalities, we use an array of custom C modules...
Or, A Heterogeneous Supercomputer in Every Pocket In the twilight of Moore’s Law, the transitions to multicore processors, GPU computing, and HaaS cloud computing are not separate trends, bu…
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Preface This is a technical article chronicling one of the most interesting bug hunts I’ve had the pleasure of chasing down. At AdGear Technologies Inc. where I work, ssh is king. We use it for management, monitoring, deployments, log file harvesting, even some event streaming. It’s solid, reliable, has all the…
Updated (February 07 2013): If you enjoy this article, you may also find the more academically-inclined article The Impact of Meta-Tracing on VM Design and Implementation interesting.
Remember when I blogged about linear read scalability out to 32 cores ? Well, the awesome Nate Boley provided me with access to his brand n...
We know what Unix's future used to look like. It was designed by the research group at Bell Labs that built Unix and called ‘Plan 9 from Bell Labs’. [ 154 ] Plan 9 was an attempt to do Unix over again, better.
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 …
ZFS keeps winning over btrfs on many fronts. Here's a short list that explains exactly how.
The hidden disconnects of ZeroMQ can be dangerous if you don’t write your application to work around them.
This is an introductory overview post for the Linux Graphics Stack, and how it currently all fits together. I initially wrote it for myself after having conversations with people like Owen Taylor, Ray Strode and Adam Jackson about this stack. I had to go back to them every month or so and learn the stuff from the…
