The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,560 posts.
Training LLMs often feels like alchemy, but understanding and optimizing the performance of your models doesn't have to. This book aims to demystify the science of scaling language models: how TPUs (and GPUs) work and how they communicate with each other, how LLMs run on real hardware, and how to parallelize your…
Bytedance, a global technology company operating a wide range of content platforms around the world at massive scale, faced significant challenges in ensuring performance and stability across its data centers. With over a million servers running containerized applications, the company required a networking solution…
WebSockets are at the very core of Compose. Learn how we scaled them to support 1000s of concurrent users.
Distributed coordination makes application complex and brittle. Because all systems eventually build on logs, we can use a shared-log approach to eliminate most coordination. We discuss this conceptually and show how this is practically implemented in the open source project Restate.
Threads, TLS, a C stdlib race, and Rust: how EdgeDB hit a hidden landmine.
Breaking up-to-date Windows 11 BitLocker encryption -- on-device but software-only
When it comes to infrastructure engineering, building a data center is probably closer to building a house than to deploying a Terraform stack.
TL;DR: We discovered the hard way that when backtrace is enabled, the anyhow library is capturing a backtrace on every error. Only when printing this error in debug format!(”err: {:?}”, error) backtrace’s symbols are resolved to human-friendly names, thus leading to a significant memory increase for your application…
Blog posts about GNU Guix.
Learn how NAT traversal works, how Tailscale can get through and securely connect your devices directly to each other.
Explore the challenges of building a change data capture (CDC) pipeline for Postgres. And see how Sequin used a watermark design inspired by Netflix's DBLog.
Or, how to break all the tools that parse the "Fixes:" tag Kees Cook There was a recent discussion about how Linux's "Fixes" tag, which ...
Several weeks ago we received a bug report from a customer that said their game was crashing when using IL2CPP scripting backend. QA verified the bug and assigned it to me for fixing. The project was quite big (although far from the largest ones); it took 40 minutes to build on my machine. The instructions on the bug…
Introducing S2, a serverless stream store that makes durable real-time streams feel as simple and scalable as object storage.
Bartek Wydrowski, Google Research; Robert Kleinberg, Google Research and Cornell; Stephen M. Rumble, Google (YouTube); Aaron Archer, Google Research
macOS 15.2 was released a few days ago, with a surprise. A terrible, awful surprise.
C2y makes memcpy(NULL, NULL, 0) and other zero-length operations on null pointers well defined. This removes a source of bugs that may result in security issues.
OrioleDB is a storage extension for PostgreSQL which uses PostgreSQL's pluggable storage system. Designed as a drop-in replacement for PostgreSQL's existing Heap storage, OrioleDB aims to overcome scalability bottlenecks and fully utilize modern hardware capabilities. By integrating seamlessly with PostgreSQL, it…
How TCP interacts with the characteristics of the Starlink service.
ESET's discovery of the first UEFI bootkit designed for Linux sendss an important message: UEFI bootkits are no longer confined to Windows systems alone.
Virtualization is a powerful technique for code obfuscation, and reversing it can be challenging. In this post, we cover the work done during an internship on developing an automated devirtualization tool. We explore a simplified taint-based approach and discuss its limitations. For a more in-depth analysis, the full…
A deep dive into the complexities of optimizing code for SIMD instruction sets across multiple platforms.
This blog post summarises a new garbage collection algorithm called Mark-Scavenge, which highlights how using reachability as a proxy for liveness in moving GCs leads to unnecessary data movement and how we can address this. This work is from the latest paper within the research collaboration between Oracle and…
ESET researchers analyzed previously unknown Linux backdoors that are connected to known Windows malware used by the China-aligned Gelsemium group, as well as to Project Wood.
A rack-scale design that drives data center power efficiency.
This week's Internet cable cuts in the Baltic Sea have been widely reported, even as attempts to understand their cause and impact continue. We turn to RIPE Atlas to provide a preliminary analysis of these events and ask to what extent the Internet in the region has been resilient to them.
How we scrape callstack information from the LuaJIT engine for profiling
From the Zed Blog: In this episode of Zed Decoded, Thorsten and Antonio walk through the performance optimizations Antonio when working on Zed's Rope data structure before they then pair on adding more optimizations
