The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
Most strings found on the Internet are encoded using a particular unicode format called UTF-8. However, not all strings of bytes are valid UTF-8. The rules as to what constitute a valid UTF-8 string are somewhat arcane. Yet it seems important to quickly validate these strings before you consume them. In a previous…
I’ve been trying to make my computers quieter for nearly three decades. Custom liquid cooling loops, magnetically-stabilised fluid-dynamic bearings, acoustic dampeners, silicone shock absorb…
**Russian ALFA Class interceptor submarine** At the height of the Cold War NATO submariners found themselves confronting a Soviet submarine which not only greatly out-performed their own boats, but which could operate beyond the reach of their weapons… Read More >….
A blog where I write down my thoughts, ideas and notions, as an exercise to cement them in my memory and improve on their concepts.
One of the lesser known parts of Java is InterruptedException. With its vague-sounding name and non-committal Javadoc, few people are able to figure out what they need to do with it. Since I myself didn’t really grok it, I decided to put together a post explaining how interruption works. If you are looking for a more…
Memory management is the heart of operating systems; it is crucial for both programming and system administration. In the next few posts I'll cover memory with an eye towards practical aspects, but wi
So, you’ve got a program that’s using more and more over time as it runs. Probably you can immediately identify this as a likely symptom of a memory leak. But when we say “memory leak”, what do we actually mean? In my experience, apparent memory leaks divide into three broad categories, each with somewhat different…
The Beav in all his geometric glory. Even though I have been using some Linux distribution or another pretty much daily for roughly two decades, I...
How T2 burstable instances and CPU credits really work, with a worked example of a busy t2.micro running out of credits and grinding to a halt.
Every concurrency API needs a way to run code concurrently. Here's some examples of what that looks like using different APIs:
I wrote this article for an online magazine called Scene Zine . Scene Zine caters to the Demo Scene, which is an digital art community dedicated to pushing the limits of computers through a mix of music, art, and computer programming. A particular category of demoscene productions, 4K intros, focus on the final…
I've had a long history playing around with Raspberry Pis and other Single Board Computers (SBCs); from building a cluster of Raspberry Pis to run Drupal, to building a distributed home temperature monitoring system with Raspberry Pis, I've spent a good deal of time testing the limits of an SBC, and also finding ways…
When building a large scale, highly available and distributed system, what architecture concepts do you need to use, in practice? In this post, I am summarizing ones I have found essential to learn and apply when building the payments system that powers Uber. This is a system with a load
Recently, I came across a function that checks whether an array is sorted, i.e. if there is no element which would be greater than its successor. Below is a sample implementation:
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
One like, one unpopular opinion is one of them top Twitter games, innit?
Back in 2015, I wrote a popular post comparing the performance of a number of microSD cards when used with the Raspberry Pi. In the intervening three years, the marketplace hasn't changed a ton, but there have been two new revisions to the Raspberry Pi (the model 3 B and just-released model 3 B+). In that article, I…
A short case study breaking down the interesting design aspects of containers.
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
UPDATE: PLEASE HELP ME TEST At some point you just need to stop looking and be blissfully ignorant...this was not one of those days. In and update to my previously updated blog article , I have found another instance where the plaintext password was written to system logs. Thi
