The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,390 posts.
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions…
You’re walking at $HOME, minding your own business. $ whoami > user $ pwd > /home/user But something is bothering your feet. It’s like if a little rock has fallen into your shoe. You take it off, to see what’s going on. $ ls -lah ./left-shoe ---------- 1 root root 4 May 30 13:20 little-rock That’s odd. It’s there, but…
Once Upon a Time there was a company called Base7Booking that by the beginning of 2016 it was supporting around 1200 databases on MySQL 5...
macOS is now largely undocumented. It’s time to do the job ourselves: what about an open collaborative project?
. It took a look longer to read the book than to play this little web game, but you get pretty much the same thing out of the game, so I hig...
Linux load averages explained, including why they include the uninterruptible I/O sleep state.
Recently at Bluecore I ran into a familiar situation: during brief periods of overload, all requests to a server were timing out. It was a catastrophic failure, where the server completely stopped serving. We added more capacity to prevent overload, but we also wanted to fix the server. Instead of exploding, it should…
This is part one of a series “ Writing a GCC back end ”. The GCC back end is configured in gcc/config.host and the implementation is p...
Troy Hunt recently published a blog post titled “Authentication guidance for the modern era”. It has a big pile of solid advice on what…
Today we’ll look at one of the most basic and the most often used methods from the Java library: System.currentTimeMillis() .
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
Earlier this month I wrote about how Windows 10 holds a lock during too much of process destruction, which both serializes this task and causes mouse-cursor hitches and UI hangs (because the same l…
I’m CC’d on mails when things get slow, but never when things work as expected or are fast…oh well. Like an umpire in baseball, if we are doing our jobs, we are invisible. Subjec…
The roadmap for latency profiling in Go
Large downloads work from all other servers, but fail from S3. Must be a problem on their end, right?
There’s a great MSR demo from 2012 that shows the effect of latency on the experience of using a tablet . If you don’t want to watch the three minute video, they basically created a device which could simulate arbitrary latencies down to a fraction of a millisecond. At 100ms (1/10th of a second), which is typical of…
The common way of deleting files and folders in Windows is via Windows Explorer (a.k.a. File Explorer ). This method is perfectly acceptable under normal circumstances, but becomes a real drag when dealing with large and complex folder structures. There is, in fact, a significant amount of of overhead when you trigger…
Deep dive into how scheduler works
On this post we're going to talk about Eventual Consistency in the context of lock-free and wait-free data structures, with focus on the C++...
The Huawei MateBook X is a high-quality 13" ultra-thin laptop with a fanless Core i5 processor. It is obviously biting the design of the Apple 12" MacBook , but it does have some notable improvements such as a slightly larger screen, a more usable keyboard with adequate key travel, and 2 USB-C ports.
I recently gave a talk on the internals of multicore OCaml GC at Jane Street offices in NYC. The slides from the talk are available online . But I felt that the slides alone aren’t particularly edifying. This post is basically the slides from the talk annotated with notes.
We are fed up with Android's endless forks! Fifty days ago I have announced postmarketOS, a touch-optimized, pre-configured Alpine Linux , which can be installed on smartphones. It avoids Android's bad habit of forking software for every single device (!) entirely by going the other way around and unifying as much as…
ZFS should have been great, but I kind of hate it: ZFS seems to be trapped in the past, before it was sidelined it as the cool storage project of choice; it's inflexible; it lacks modern flash integration; and it's not directly supported by most operating systems. But I put all my valuable data on ZFS because it…
Hello everyone! After many years of using a massively hacked-up version of dcoombs's NITLog page generator to host these pages, I've become,...
Did you think that OpenBSD is suitable only for firewalls and high-security servers? Think again. Here are my steps to transform a modern m...
This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM an…
