The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort , which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator…
It’s been almost 2 full years since Linux became a CNA (Certificate Numbering Authority) which meant that we (i.e. the kernel.org community) are now responsible for issuing all CVEs for the Linux kernel. During this time, we’ve become one of the largest creators of CVEs by quantity, going from nothing to number 3 in…
Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point copro...
Putting FreeBSD’s “power to serve” motto to the test. On Thanksgiving morning, I woke up to one of my web services being unavailable. All HTTP requests failed with a “503 Service unavailable” error. I logged into the console, saw a simplistic “Runtime version: Error” message, and was not able to diagnose the problem…
How Mac applications evolved from a multitude of resources to a bundle formed from a standard layout of directories, and how they have come to be largely self-contained in macOS 26.
Most books and courses introduce Linux through shell commands, leaving the kernel as a mysterious black box doing magic behind the scenes. In this post, we will run some experiments to demystify it: the Linux kernel is just a binary that you can build and run.
When your software team needs to pick a language today, you typically weigh two factors: language performance and developer velocity.
Pattern recognition can see through obfuscated code to find the right instruction
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
We learn why adding on x86 isn't as obvious as you might think
Announcing AoCO 2025 - daily December posts about compiler optimisations
See how AWS Lambda arm64 stacks up against x86_64 in real-world benchmarks across CPU, memory, and I/O workloads using Node.js, Python, and Rust.
Sending a ping by creating an ICMP socket normally requires root: you can’t create a raw socket to send ICMP packets without it. The ping command line tool works without root however, how is that possible? It turns out you can create a UDP socket with a protocol flag, which allows you to send the ping rootless. I…
What was the key to successfully learning to drive, ride a bike, or speak a foreign language? Confidence, and it’s every bit as important in computing, and in macOS.
Why do compilers love xor-ing registers so much?
In distributed systems, there’s a common understanding that it is not possible to guarantee exactly-once delivery of messages. What is possible though is exactly-once processing. By adding a unique …
I’m still the new person here, learning your ways, stumbling over the occasional quirk, smiling when I find the small touches that make you different. You remind me of what computing felt like before the noise. Before hype cycles and performance theatre. Before every tool needed a plugin system and a logo. You are…
If you want €:\, you can have it, sort of
Landlock is a Linux API that lets applications explicitly declare which resources they are allowed to access. Its philosophy is similar to OpenBSD’s unveil() and (less so) pledge() : programs can make a contract with the kernel stating, “I only need these files or resources — deny me everything else if I’m…
Aviation insiders say an airworthiness directive may soon require software updates across the Airbus A320 fleet after investigators linked a JetBlue incident—where the aircraft entered a sudden uncommanded descent—to a faulty ELAC computer. Any grounding is expected to be short and staggered, with airlines updating…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Let's explore and deobfuscate the input stack on Linux. Our aim is to understand its components and what each does. Input handling can be divided into two parts, separated by a common layer. We’ll try to make sense of all this, one thing at a time, with a logical and coherent approach.
My take on Windows NT subsystems and the thin line between VMs and subsystems.
I've been studying the standard cell circuitry in the Intel 386 processor recently. The 386, introduced in 1985, was Intel's most complex pr...
1.0 The Silicon Root of Trust: Pre-Boot & Hardware Primitives The security of the macOS platform on Apple Silicon is not defined by the kernel; it is d...
I have been writing production applications in Go for a few years now. I like some aspects of Go. One aspect I do not like is how easy it is to create data races in Go.
How dare you!
Have you ever asked yourself which protocols get used when downloading pictures from the Perseverance Mars rover to Earth? I hadn’t thought about that either, until I came across an intriguing message on the internet, back in April 2024: I’m looking for someone knowledgeable of quic/quinn to help us out for our deep…
A friend cleaned up and gave me a copy of a game I've not heard about before: Castrol Honda Superbike World Champions , a motorbike racing game for PC, released 1998 by Interactive Entertainment Ltd. and Midas Interactive Entertainment.
