1
Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 120 posts.
2
Chromium project finds that 70% of security defects are memory safety problems
The Chromium project finds that around 70% of our serious security bugs are memory safety problems . Our next major project is to prevent such bugs at source.
3
4
Jepsen: MongoDB 4.2.6
2020-05-26: MongoDB identified a bug in the transaction retry mechanism which they believe was responsible for the anomalies observed in this report; a patch is scheduled for 4.2.8.
5
6
Scaling SQLite to 4M QPS on a Single Server (EC2 vs. Bare Metal)
Discover how Expensify achieved remarkable scaling: 4M QPS on one server! Dive into optimizing SQLite for impressive performance gains.
7
Undefined behavior can result in time travel (2014)
The rules of logic no longer apply when you cross the line.
8
There are only four billion floats, so test them all (2014)
A few months ago I saw a blog post touting fancy new SSE3 functions for implementing vector floor, ceil, and round functions. There was the inevitable proud proclaiming of impressive performance an…
9
Rewriting the heart of our sync engine
Over the past four years, we've been working hard on rebuilding our desktop client's sync engine from scratch. The sync engine is the magic behind the Dropbox folder on your desktop computer, and it's one of the oldest and most important pieces of code at Dropbox. We're proud to announce today that we've shipped this…
10
DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux
DirectX 12, NVIDIA CUDA, OpenGL and OpenCL acceleration are coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
11
ZFS: Use mirror vdevs, not RAIDZ
Continuing this week’s “making an article so I don’t have to keep typing it” ZFS series… here’s why you should stop using RAIDZ, and start using mirror vdevs instead.
12
13
Performance Improvements in .NET 5
Explore many performance improvements, big and small, that have gone into the .NET 5 runtime and core libraries to make apps and services leaner and faster.
14
Systemd, ten years later: a historical and technical retrospective
10 years ago, systemd was announced and swiftly rose to become one of the most persistently controversial and polarizing pieces of software in recent history, and especially in the GNU/Linux world. The quality and nature of debate has not improved in the least from the major flame wars around 2012-2014, and systemd…
15
Amazon S3 Update – Strong Read-After-Write Consistency
When we launched S3 back in 2006, I discussed its virtually unlimited capacity (“…easily store any number of blocks…”), the fact that it was designed to provide 99.99% availability, and that it offered durable storage, with data transparently stored in multiple locations. Since that launch, our customers have used S3…
16
Scaling Datastores at Slack with Vitess
From the very beginning of Slack, MySQL was used as the storage engine for all our data. Slack operated MySQL servers in an active-active configuration. This is the story of how we changed our data storage architecture from the active-active clusters over to Vitess — a horizontal scaling system for MySQL. Vitess is…
17
Introducing x64 emulation in preview for Windows 10 on ARM PCs to the Windows Insider Program
Updated 11/16/2021: x64 emulation for Windows is now generally available in Windows 11. For those interested in experiencing this, a PC running Windows 11 on Arm is required. Today, we're releasing the first preview of x64 emulation
18
GPUDirect Storage: A Direct Path Between Storage and GPU Memory
As AI and HPC datasets continue to increase in size, the time spent loading data for a given application begins to place a strain on the total application’s performance. When considering end-to-end…
19
On Abandoning the X Server
There's been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feed...
20
SQLite Is Serverless
Most SQL database engines are implemented as a separate server process. Programs that want to access the database communicate with the server using some kind of interprocess communication (typically TCP/IP) to send requests to the server and to receive back results. SQLite does not work this way. With SQLite, the…
21
A Concurrency Cost Hierarchy
Concurrent operations can be grouped relatively neatly into categories based on their cost
22
Gathering Intel on Intel AVX-512 Transitions
Investigating some details of SIMD related frequency transitions on Intel CPUs.
23
24
The Day The Standard Library Died
In Prague, the C++ committee took a series of polls on whether to break ABI, and decided not to. There was no applause. But I’m not sure we fully understood what we did and the consequences it could have.
25
AF_UNIX comes to Windows
Introduction: Beginning in Insider Build 17063, you’ll be able to use the unix socket (AF_UNIX) address family on Windows to communicate between Win32
26
Mitigating Spectre and Other Security Threats: The Cloudflare Workers Security Model
Cloudflare is a security company, and the heart of Workers is, in my view, a security project. Running code written by third parties is always a scary proposition, and the primary concern of the Workers team is to make that safe.
27
A log/event processing pipeline you can't have (2019)
Let me tell you about the still-not-defunct real-time log processing pipeline we built at my now-defunct last job. It handled logs from a la...
28
Sandboxing and workload isolation
Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.
29
Ice Lake AVX-512 Downclocking
Examining the extent of AVX related downclocking on Intel’s Ice Lake CPU
30
So you want to build an embedded Linux system?
(Heads up — this article was published in October 2020. Much of the general discussion is still relevant, but many of these SoCs are getting quite long in the tooth, and some of the software issues mentioned here have been addressed)