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Welcome to Gas Town
Happy New Year, and Welcome to Gas Town!
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 27 posts.
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An update on recent Claude Code quality reports
We traced recent reports of Claude Code quality issues to three separate changes. Here's what happened, what we fixed, and what we're changing.
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Flawed routers flood University of Wisconsin internet time server (2003)
ABSTRACT In May 2003, the University of Wisconsin - Madison found that it was the recipient of a continuous large scale flood of inbound Internet traffic destined for one of the campus' public Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers. The flood traffic rate was hundreds-of-thousands of packets-per-second, and hundreds of…
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The Waymo World Model
We are excited to introduce the Waymo World Model, a frontier generative model that sets a new bar for large-scale, hyper-realistic autonomous driving simulation.
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Debunking Zswap and Zram Myths
zswap and zram are fundamentally different approaches with different philosophies. If in doubt, use zswap.
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Things Unix can do atomically (2010)
This is a catalog of things UNIX-like/POSIX-compliant operating systems can do atomically, making them useful as building blocks for thread-safe and multi-process-safe programs without mutexes or read/write locks. The list is by no means exhaustive and I expect it to be updated frequently for the foreseeable future.
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Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)
macOS Internals Deep Dive Building a Development Kernel Collection Configuring our Mac to boot the Development Kernel Collection Putting our machine to work! When did Apple grace us with this feature? Undoing our work for OS updates Closing Thoughts
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Permacomputing
By Devine Lu Linvega
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Async Rust vs RTOS showdown (2022)
It's time for another technical blog post about async Rust on embedded. This time we're going to pitch Embassy/Rust against FreeRTOS/C on an STM32F446 microcontroller.
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Creepy Crawlies
You've probably heard me complain about the "AI crawlers" before, but now I actually have some hard numbers I can put up to show their im...
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The session you cannot take with you
Inference APIs are filling sessions with encrypted reasoning, hidden search results, opaque compaction, and encrypted subagent messages. A growing form of lock-in.
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The August 17 outage
An update on the August 17 outage and the steps we're taking to improve reliability.
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GhostLock, a stack-UAF that has existed in all Linux distributions for 15 years
GhostLock (CVE-2026-43499) is a Linux kernel vulnerability found by Nebu that exists in every major distribution since 2011. Triggering the bug does not require any special kernel config or privilege. By turning it into a 97% stable privilege escalation and container escape, Google has rewarded us $92,337 in…
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Kitty 0.50
kitty is a feature-rich, cross-platform, fast, GPU based terminal. To update kitty, follow the instructions. Recent major new features: Docked windows [0.50]: kitty windows can now be docked to an ...
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Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)
In this article I will introduce a new command line search tool, ripgrep , that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw performance of GNU grep. ripgrep is fast, cross platform (with binaries available for Linux, Mac and Windows) and written in Rust .
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Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout
The final report of the Expert Panel on the 28 April 2025 blackout in continental Spain and Portugal identifies the causes of the blackout and outlines recommendations to strengthen the resilience of Europe’s interconnected electricity system. It was prepared by a technical Expert Panel of 49 members, including…
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Monzo Stand-In
Our customers reasonably expect to be able to spend on their card, make bank transfers and pay their bills 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Their lives don’t have downtime for maintenance so nor should we. We dedicate a lot of our engineering effort to minimise the risk of downtime during technical migrations and…
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Everyone should know SIMD
SIMD has a reputation for being complex. I've met many very good software engineers who dismiss it as something too complex to learn or a niche optimization meant for only the highest-performance software, not useful in everyday programming.
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Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak
A few months ago, users started reporting that Ghostty was consuming absurd amounts of memory, with one user reporting 37 GB after 10 days of uptime. Today, I'm happy to say the fix has been found and merged . This post is an overview of what caused the leak, a look at some of Ghostty's internals, and some brief…
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Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4
Modern applications often spread state across a variety of systems: databases, caches, queues, data warehouses, search indices, and so on. Coordinating these systems is challenging: caches are often stale, the analytics platform might lag days behind the primary database, the search index might lose data, and…
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Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager
Traditional Wayland compositors have a monolithic architecture that combines the compositor and window manager into a single program. This has the downside of requiring Wayland window managers to do the significant work of implementing an entire Wayland compositor as well.
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What even is an OS now?
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
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5x faster Edge Functions: V8 isolates to Firecracker MicroVMs
See how Netlify rebuilt Edge Functions on MicroVMs to deliver lower latency, greater reliability, and faster log delivery.
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macOS's Little-Known Command-Line Sandboxing Tool (2025)
AVAILABLE NOW OpenAI, Anthropic, and Chrome ship it. Apple deprecated it. Nobody documented it. Until now. → sandbox-exec: The Miss...
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The Components of Agent Memory
For Claude to learn from experience, it has to decide what’s worth remembering before it knows what’s next. Here’s how “dreaming” helps it organize memory and correct mistakes.
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SpacetimeDB: a short technical review
This blog post has been archived! SpacetimeDB has improved a lot since I initially published this technical review, and most of the technical details in it no longer apply.