The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
In part four of this series we looked at some key trade-offs involved with a distributed log implementation and discussed a few lessons learned while building NATS Streaming. In this fifth and final installment, we’ll conclude by outlining the design for a new log-based system that draws from the previous entries in…
Dave Kerr, partner and Head of Engineering at QuantumBlack Labs, McKinsey & Company. Writing on software engineering and agentic AI.
If you were like me in college, you first learned about the C programming language in an introductory computer science course. Then, perhaps you took a really hard course in operating systems. Then, y
In this short post I’m going to attempt to convince you that current network (Internet) latencies are here to stay, because they are already within a fairly small factor of what is possible u…
PostgreSQL version 10 brings a much anticipated feature: (Native) Table Partitioning .
I keep getting a lot of private emails about my previous post about the latest status of the Linux kernel patches to resolve both the Meltdown and …
Computers store data as streams of bits. Binary files like image, audio or video files are allowed to contain just about any sequence of bits. However, we also often use text formats; for example, web pages and emails are required to be text. So how do we send images by email? How do we embed … Continue reading…
The three levels of software, a framework by Jimmy Koppel: runtime, code, and logic, and why code that never fails can still be wrong.
The story of these attacks starts in late 2004. I had submitted my doctoral thesis and had a few months before flying back to Oxford for my defense, so I turned to some light reading: Intel's latest "Optimization Manual", full of tips on how to write faster code. (Eking out every last nanosecond of performance has…
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
In late 2002, Byte.com decided to combat falling ad revenue by charging admission to its archives of computing content. I have first-hand experience tring to harvest enough revenue from the Internet to pay operating costs, and fully support Byte's decision to move to a subscription model. However, my BeView columns on…
Writing a minimal x86-64 JIT compiler in C++ that runs on macOS, Linux and WSL - Part 2
A while ago I did a blog post about how long DNS resolvers hold results in cache for, using RIPE Atlas probes testing against their default resolvers (in a lot of cases, the DNS cache on their modem/router).
Let me assure you, the "fluxcapacitor" project is very interesting. Unfortunately, I find it very difficult to describe what it does. For this project I completely fail the elevator pitch .
wingolog: article: spectre and the end of langsec
Last week, Microsoft issued January’s cumulative security fixes for January 2018. Although the media focus has been around “Meltdown” and…
In part two of this series we discussed data replication within the context of a distributed log and how it relates to high availability. Next, we’ll look at what it takes to scale the log such that it can handle non-trivial workloads. Data Scalability A key part of scaling any kind of data-intensive system is the…
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was…
We’ve all probably seen Java’s String comparison function before. It compares strings by the first differing character, falling back to the length difference when they are identical up to the end of the shorter string:
By now, everyone knows that something “big” just got announced regarding computer security. Heck, when the Daily Mail does a report on it …
What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time? I asked the above quiz question during the Geekcamp tech conference in Nov 2017 during my emcee role. The theoretical answer as you can glean from the title of this post is the 486 which was first released in 1989. I…
When you can’t remove an app which you installed just a few minutes ago, you know there’s something wrong. Here’s the solution, and why this is bad security.
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