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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 51 posts.
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The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
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Boundaries
This talk is about using simple values (as opposed to complex objects) not just for holding data, but also as the boundaries between components and subsystems. It moves through many topics: functional programming; mutability's relationship to OO; isolated unit testing with and without test doubles; and concurrency, to…
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Linux on an 8-bit micro
Dmitry.GR: A successful experiment in running real Linux on an 8-bit AVR.
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Response Time Limits: Article by Jakob Nielsen
How users react to delays in a user interface, whether website or application. The 3 main response time limits are determined by human perceptual abilities.
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The Biggest Myths
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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Fixing Unix Filenames (2012)
This article will try to convince you that adding some limitations on legal Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames would be an improvement. Many programs already presume these limitations, the POSIX standard already permits such limitations, and many Unix/Linux filesystems already embed such limitations so it'd be better to make…
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Profiling Go Programs
How to use Go's built-in profiler to understand and optimize your programs.
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ARM64 and You
Ever since the iPhone 5S was announced a couple of weeks ago , the world of tech journalism has been filled with massive quantities of misinformation . Unfortunately, good information takes time, and the world of tech journalism is more about speed than accuracy. Today, as suggested by a variety of readers, I'm going…
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Jepsen: Postgres
Previously on Jepsen , we introduced the problem of network partitions . Here, we demonstrate that a few transactions which “fail” during the start of a partition may have actually succeeded.
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Linux 3.8 Released
Summary of the changes and new features merged in the Linux Kernel during the 2.6.x and 3.x development
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HTTP Archive: jQuery
A recent thread on Github for html5-boilerplate discusses whether there’s a benefit from loading jQuery from Google Hosted Libraries , as opposed to serving it from your local server. They referenced the great article Caching and the Google AJAX Libraries by Steve Webster.
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Jepsen: Redis
Previously on Jepsen , we explored two-phase commit in Postgres . In this post, we demonstrate Redis losing 56% of writes during a partition.
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Distributed systems for fun and profit
git , Single page HTML , Kindle .mobi , PDF , .epub , HTML for printing , book cover .
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The network is reliable
I’ve been discussing Jepsen and partition tolerance with Peter Bailis over the past few weeks, and I’m honored to present this post as a collaboration between the two of us. We’d also like to extend our sincere appreciation to everyone who contributed their research and experience to this piece.
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Jepsen: On the perils of network partitions
This article is part of Jepsen , a series on network partitions. We’re going to learn about distributed consensus, discuss the CAP theorem’s implications, and demonstrate how different databases behave under partition.
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Communicating Sequential Processes
With the arrival of core.async , ClojureScript provides a powerful advantage over other popular compile to JavaScript languages like CoffeeScript , Dart , and TypeScript . These languages fail to address the single largest source of incidental complexity for any sizeable client side application - concurrency. In my…
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Windows NT Kernel Contributor Explains Why Performance is Behind Other OS
I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous...
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Call me maybe: Cassandra
Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in…
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TRESOR Runs Encryption Securely Outside RAM
TRESOR is a secure implementation of AES which is resistant against cold boot attacks. The basic idea behind this implementation is to store the secret key inside CPU registers rather than in RAM.
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Multiprocess Firefox
Since this January, David Anderson and I have been working on making Firefox use multiple processes. Tom Schuster (evilpie on IRC) joined us as an intern this summer, and Felipe Gomes, Mark Hammond…
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Readings in distributed systems
This post is a work in progress.Inspired by a recent purchase of the Red Book, which providesa curated list of important papers around database systems, I’ve decidedto begin assembling a list of im...
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Windows Timer Resolution: Megawatts Wasted
The default timer resolution on Windows is 15.6 ms – a timer interrupt 64 times a second. When programs increase the timer frequency they increase power consumption and harm battery life. They also…