Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 109 posts.
As of Summer 2024, my article "What Colour are your bits?" has been online 20 years, and people are still linking to it as a benchmark. It's clear that people still care about intellectual property in general and copyright in particular, and the difference, if any, between id...
I've had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices…
There’s a great MSR demo from 2012 that shows the effect of latency on the experience of using a tablet . If you don’t want to watch the three minute video, they basically created a device which could simulate arbitrary latencies down to a fraction of a millisecond. At 100ms (1/10th of a second), which is typical of…
SQLite reads and writes small blobs (for example, thumbnail images) 35% faster¹ than the same blobs can be read from or written to individual files on disk using fread() or fwrite().
If you look at “gaming" keyboards, a lot of them sell for $100 or more on the promise that they’re fast. Ad copy that you’ll see includes:
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
The TTY subsystem is central to the design of Linux, and UNIX in general. Unfortunately, its importance is often overlooked, and it is difficult to find good introductory articles about it. I believe that a basic understanding of TTYs in Linux is essential for the developer and the advanced user.
When I was a young coder, just starting out in the big scary world of enterprise software, an older, far more experienced chap gave me a ste...
Confluent is building the foundational platform for data in motion so any organization can innovate and win in a digital-first world.
As some of you may know, there's a wall of lava lamps in the lobby of our San Francisco office that we use for cryptography. In this post, we’re going to explore how that works in technical detail.
While I was writing the post comparing the new Qualcomm server chip, Centriq, to our current stock of Intel Skylake-based Xeons, I noticed a disturbing phenomena.
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room…
A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightweight styling were…
The Firefox Quantum release is getting close. It brings many performance improvements, including the super fast CSS engine that we brought over from Servo. But there’s another big piece of ...
Project Quantum is a major rewrite of Firefox’s internals to make Firefox fast. We’re swapping in parts from our experimental browser, Servo, and making massive improvements to other parts of ...
I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006. The most frustrating year of those seven was the ...
Postmortem on the database outage of January 31 2017 with the lessons we learned.
Like all Linux network interfaces, WireGuard integrates into the network namespace infrastructure. This means an administrator can have several entirely different networking subsystems and choose which interfaces live in each.
Browse technical documentation on the public-key cryptography that powers Keybase. Learn how Keybase Chats, Files, Teams, and Git are secured.
Understand Spanner's TrueTime and external consistency, ensuring globally consistent reads and writes across the distributed database.
It’s been 3 months since I first wrote about our efforts to scale Git to extremely large projects and teams with an effort we called “Git Virtual File System”. As a reminder, GVFS, together with a set of enhancements to Git, enables Git to scale to VERY large repos by virtualizing both the .git folder […]
As some of you may know, there's a wall of lava lamps in the lobby of our San Francisco office that we use for cryptography. In this post, we’re going to explore how that works.
CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database, loosely patterned after Google Spanner and designed for semi-synchronous networks. It speaks the PostgreSQL wire protocol , supports a reasonable dialect of SQL , and combines replication for durability with transparent scale-out sharding for large tables. Its most…
From heat guns to kernel compiler flags
In the past year and a half, MongoDB has put a good deal of work into improved read safety, enabled by the adoption of their new replication protocol and the WiredTiger storage engine. Dirty reads were addressed in 3.2 by introducing a majority read concern , and stale reads were addressed with the introduction of the…
This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM an…
This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC .
