1
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…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 67 posts.
2
Coroutines in C (2000)
Structuring a large program is always a difficult job. One of the particular problems that often comes up is this: if you have a piece of code producing data, and another piece of code consuming it, which should be the caller and which should be the callee?
3
The LMAX Architecture (2011)
LMAX is a retail financial trading system that can handle that can 6 million orders per second on a single JVM thread. The business logic runs in-memory surrounded by disruptors using event sourcing.
4
John Carmack on inlined code (2014)
(Here begins a comment written by John Carmack in 2014, about an email he sent to a programmers’ mailing list in 2007.)
5
The six dumbest ideas in computer security (2005)
There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to the fact that it's…
6
Upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X Elite
Discover the power of Snapdragon X Elite with upstreamed Linux kernel support. Explore areas of focus and unlock new potential with Snapdragon Linux today.
7
"I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower" (2013)
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...
8
SQLite: Wal2 Mode
"Wal2" mode is very similar to "wal" mode. To change a database to wal2 mode, use the command:
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Writing down (and searching through) every UUID
I couldn't remember every UUID so I wrote them all down
11
UTC, Tai, and Unix Time (2001)
TAI times are identified by year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. There are exactly 86400 TAI seconds in every TAI day. TAI days are labelled by the Gregorian calendar.
12
The power of two random choices
In many large-scale web services, multiple layers of stateless and stateful services are seperated by load balancers. Load balancing can be done with dedicated hardware, with dedicated software load balancers, using DNS trickery or through a load-balancing mechanism in the client. In large systems, the resources and…
13
How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections . Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds , making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't…
14
So good, it works on barbed wire (2001)
Next time you look at a transmission line, I hope you'll focus on the big four properties: characteristic impedance, high-frequency loss, delay, and cros...
15
Zen5's AVX512 Teardown and More
This article was supposed to be published all at once on July 30'th. But because of the staggered launch delay into August 8 and 15, some sections of this article were redacted until August 14th.
16
Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
Then come along! Let’s make a compiler that goes all the way from source to assembly from scratch—no shortcuts!
17
NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules
With the R515 driver, NVIDIA released a set of Linux GPU kernel modules in May 2022 as open source with dual GPL and MIT licensing. The initial release targeted datacenter compute GPUs…
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Attacking UNIX Systems via CUPS
Hello friends, this is the first of two, possibly three (if and when I have time to finish the Windows research) writeups. We will start with targeting GNU/Lin…
20
Unix and Multics (2019)
Story from the development of the Multics operating system. Unix, our famous child.
21
Engineering for Slow Internet
How to minimize user frustration in Antarctica.
22
Linux/4004: booting Linux on Intel 4004 for fun, art, and no profit
Dmitry.GR: Slowly booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit
23
Google Sheets ported its calculation worker from JavaScript to WasmGC
Calculations in Google Sheets were initially done on the server, then on the client in JavaScript, and now on the client in WebAssembly Garbage Collection. This case study explains how and why.
24
How Discord stores trillions of messages (2023)
Engineer Bo Ingram shares insight into how Discord shoulders its traffic and provides a platform for our users to communicate.
25
Intel Processor Instability Causing Oodle Decompression Failures
RAD Game Tools' web page. RAD makes Bink Video, the Telemetry Performance Visualization System, and Oodle Data Compression - all popular video game middleware.
26
The V8 Sandbox
V8 features a lightweight, in-process sandbox to limit the impact of memory corruption bugs
27
Making Rust binaries smaller by default
Have you ever tried to compile a helloworld Rust program in --release mode? If yes, have you seen its binary size? Suffice to say, it’s not exactly small. Or at least it wasn’t small until recently. This post details how I found about the issue and my attempt to fix it in Cargo.
28
Why Oxide Chose Illumos
Servers in the Oxide Rack will form the backbone of both the compute and storage services available to customers. The rack will be composed of a variety of hardware and software components, some of which represent resource-constrained or inflexible environments; e.g., the Service Processor (SP) or Hardware Root Of…
29
Zed Decoded: Rope and SumTree
From the Zed Blog: In this episode of Zed Decoded, Thorsten asks the founders — Nathan, Max, Antonio — about the data structures at the heart of Zed: Rope and SumTree.
30
DirectX Adopting SPIR-V as the Interchange Format of the Future
Today the Direct3D and HLSL teams are excited to share some insight into the next big step for GPU programmability. Once Shader Model 7 is released,