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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. 79 posts.
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The Full-Source Bootstrap: Building from source all the way down
Blog posts about GNU Guix.
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Handles are the better pointers (2018)
28-Nov-2018: I’ve added a small update at the end on how to prevent‘handle collisions’ with a per-slot generation counter
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Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System? (2022)
MMAP Databases = 💩
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Envisioning a Simplified Intel Architecture
Intel investigated architectural enhancements and modifications for a 64-bit mode-only architecture.
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Raspberry Pi 5 has no hardware video encoding and only HEVC decoding
Announcing Raspberry Pi 5, coming in late October: over 2x faster than Raspberry Pi 4, featuring silicon designed in-house at Raspberry Pi.
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SQLite Begin Concurrent
Usually, SQLite allows at most one writer to proceed concurrently. The BEGIN CONCURRENT enhancement allows multiple writers to process write transactions simultanously if the database is in "wal" or "wal2" mode, although the system still serializes COMMIT commands.
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You cannot have exactly-once delivery (2015)
I’m often surprised that people continually have fundamental misconceptions about how distributed systems behave. I myself shared many of these misconceptions, so I try not to demean or dismiss but rather educate and enlighten, hopefully while sounding less preachy than that just did. I continue to learn only by…
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“Clean” code, horrible performance
Many programming "best practices" taught today are performance disasters waiting to happen.
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Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
From the Zed Blog: A deep-dive into the graphical underpinnings of GPUI, the hardware-accelerated framework that powers Zed's user interface.
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Filenames and pathnames in shell: How to do it correctly (2020)
This article explains how to correctly handle filenames in Bourne shells (the primary shell of Unix/Linux/POSIX systems), based on the issues discussed in 'Fixing Unix/Linux/Filenames'. Many programs fail to work properly on filenames that include spaces, begin with dash (-), include newlines, and so on, because…
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Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably
Microsoft retrieved the Northern Isles underwater datacenter from the seafloor off Scotland's Orkney Islands. Project Natick is proving the concept of underwater datacenters is feasible as well as logistically, environmentally and economically practical.
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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.
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Surpassing 10Gb/S over Tailscale
Discover how Tailscale achieved over 10Gb/s throughput on Linux using advanced UDP segmentation and checksum optimizations. Explore benchmarks, results, and the innovations powering wireguard go's latest performance leap.
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JIT-optimized Ruby can outperform a C extension
YJIT’s ability to improve performance by adapting to run-time behavior can increase the speed of our code in a way that dropping down to C can’t. As such, I think we should reconsider the common wisdom that “rewriting our Ruby in C” is the ideal path to performance optimization and take a serious look at “rewriting…
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The Cloud Computer
Announcing the world's first commercial cloud computer.
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Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
Amazon produces and delivers to customers world-class entertainment via Prime Video, Amazon MGM Studios, MGM+, Amazon Music, Audible, Wondery, Amazon Games, and Twitch. Amazon’s entertainment properties empower millions of customers around the world to enjoy a massive selection of the very best in…
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Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3
Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
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We reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100x
I’m going to cover a lot of ground in this post, so here’s the TLDR: We built a Twitter-scale Mastodon instance from scratch in only 10k lines of code. This is 100x less code than the ~1M lines Twi…
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A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32
How a mistake of less than half a millimeter in a single part nearly brought down the world’s largest passenger aircraft.
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Fast machines, slow machines
Well, that was unexpected. I recorded a couple of crappy videos in 5 minutes, posted them on a Twitter thread, and went viral with 8.8K likes at this point. I really could not have predicted that, given that I’ve been posting what-I-believe-is interesting content for years and… nothing, almost-zero interest. Now that…
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Carving the scheduler out of our orchestrator
A deep dive into container scheduling and Flyd, our new orchestrator.
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C and C++ prioritize performance over correctness
The original ANSI C standard, C89, introduced the concept of “undefined behavior,” which was used both to describe the effect of outright bugs like accessing memory in a freed object and also to capture the fact that existing implementations differed about handling certain aspects of the language, including use of…
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Learnings from kCTF VRP's 42 Linux kernel exploits submissions
Tamás Koczka, Security Engineer In 2020 , we integrated kCTF into Google's Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP) to support researchers evalu...
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A dive into the AMD driver workflow
I ended up getting a response from high level people at AMD. It was still very light on any real technical information, but it did include some great phrases like “I am able to replicate the issues you are facing” and some mockable phrases like “We are hoping that this will improve your perception of AMD products and…
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Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)
These extensions expand the x86 instruction set with access to registers and features that improve performance.
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X Window System Basics (2014)
Since this article contains a lot of interactive demos relying on fairly modern browser technology, let's make sure that everything is OK before continuing.
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Zenbleed
If you remove the first word from the string "hello world" , what should the result be? This is the story of how we discovered that the answer could be your root password!