The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today, it was going to be the ubiquitous graphical platform that would be used on everything from cell phones to supercomputers: write once, run anywhere. Initially …
During the winter of 2024, I restored an IBM PS/1 486-DX2 66Mhz, "Mini-Tower", model 2168. It was the computer I always wanted as a teenager but could never afford. Words cannot do justice to the joy I felt while working on this machine.
This week-end project started by browsing the open-data repository of Paris’ public transport network, which contains various APIs to query real-time departures, current disruptions, etc.The data reuse section caught my eye, as it features external projects that use this open data.In particular, the RATP status…
Json parsing in C using function pointers attached to a struct
TLDR; Starting from Linux kernel version 6.9 on x86_64, there’s a new config option CONFIG_X86_FRED enabled and it adds 16 bytes to the starting point of a task’s kernel stack area, so you’ll need to account for this extra padding in your “raw” kernel stack & pt_regs lookup code. Update: It turns out that there’s a…
A while back my machine was so messed up that I could barely ssh onto it. 3,200% CPU utilization - all 32 cores on the host were fully utilized! Compare that to my last bug where it only used 1 core, 100% Fortunately, it was using Java 17 runtime which...
Notes on installing and netbooting Windows 11 over iSCSI
So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2…
A collection of 150+ nifty tips and tricks for macOS, for both system features like the Dock, Spotlight, and Mission Control and built-in apps like Safari, Mail, and Photos.
Over the last decade, we’ve seen great advancements in distributed systems, but the way we program them has seen few fundamental improvements. While we can sometimes abstract away distribution (Spark, Redis, etc.), developers still struggle with challenges like concurrency, fault tolerance, and versioning. There are…
I want to write a post about Pitchfork, explaining where it comes from, why it is like it is, and how I see its future. But before I can get to that, I think I need to share my mental model on a few things, in this case, HTTP/2.
I’m setting up an old Dell box (2011-era tech). I was migrating to some new boot drives and setting up grub on them again. Got to the point of deleting the old boot entries and adding new ones, and got an error like Could not prepare boot variable: No space left on device. Weird, because there weren’t that many EFI…
Recently I encountered a bug so cute that I immediately knew that I will want to share it on my blog. It was one of those bugs that even Rust can’t save you from. It occurred in HyperQueue (HQ), a distributed task scheduler written in Rust that I work on.
Notes on using the Z3 constraint solver with the Clang Static Analyzer
I’d like to talk more about a container technology that I really like that I touched upon in a previous article : systemd-nspawn .
What should you do with your unclosed browser tabs? I ran pong in mine.
By examining the limits of reasonable user behavior and embracing imperfection for users who go beyond it, we can continue to provide service that meets the expectations of users without sacrificing scalability of the system.
There is oft-quoted advice that Kafka does poorly as a job queue. I’ve experienced this myself, and I wanted to formalize it a bit.
This app has a surprising number of anti-debugging protections. Let's figure out how to bypass them.
We discuss how to make sure that your access to TLS (thread-local storage) is fast, and how the presence of constructors and shared libraries affects the access time.
Adventures in programming, hardware, DSP, and chiptune
Yesterday I read this toot (German) over on mastodon which starts with “IPv6 is hard.” No it’s not. It’s different. I ran across this multiple times: There is an A and an AAAA-record for a FQDN, but the web server is only reachable via IPv4. You can easily test this with curl $ curl -4 https://github.com -o /dev/null…
At Terrateam, we are big fans of Fly.io. The service is hosted there and it’s served us well. Just deploy your TOML file, get your infrastructure, do something else with the rest of your day. One of the interesting sides of Fly is that they invest heavily in server-side SQLite. They’ve written a number of blog posts…
Read on to learn how we used network packet captures and BPF to debug web server performance, ultimately uncovering a Linux kernel performance issue. This investigation was a collaboration between myself and my colleagues.
So a bit under 3 years ago, I made my infamous Wayland rant post that is likely the most read post on this blog by miles. I should really actually write about music again one of these days, but that's a topic for another time. The language was perhaps a bit inflammatory, but I felt the criticisms I made at the time…
WebAssembly is a true write-once-run-anywhere experience.
Talking about my description of tech as “boring” to be a compliment, and how to think about it.
The Rust language ecosystem is growing each day, its popularity increasing, and with good reason. It’s the only mainstream language that provides memory and concurrency safety at compile time…
