The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
Elixir was built on Erlang. Erlang was built to provide "consistently low latency" and a few other audacious goals. Note, this is not a hard realtime constraint. It is soft, squishy and yet, important and real. It makes Erlang unusually suitable to systems where latency matters and where a near-realtime experience is…
If you ever get a chance to look through the classic Amiga OS source-code still floating around some murky corners of the internet, it is a thing of beauty and astonishing capabilities. It’s an inspirational piece of computing history with unmatched capabilities for the time. Remember, this was all on a computer…
As mentioned on previous posts, I have spent the past few weeks dealing with a ZFS crash on my FreeNAS install. Because of that, not only was I forced to learn how to troubleshoot ZFS, but I also had to learn how to setup new volumes and come up with new backup strategies (between a few other things).
This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years, in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array. Like the best programming tricks, this one is the right tool for the job…
I wish I knew if my math was correct...
I encountered the idea as a student, when I first read The Art of Computer Programming . I’d been programming already for most of my childhood, and I was completely blown away by the idea, which was entirely new to me. In fact, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that in the whole of TAOCP that was the single…
It is time to celebrate EC2-Classic, which defined early cloud computing, and which is finally retiring.
This post will show you how to use D to write a bare-metal “Hello world” program that targets the RISC-V QEMU simulator. In a future blog post ( now available ) we’ll build on this to target actual hardware: the VisionFive 2 SBC. See blog-code for the final code from this post. For a more complex example, see…
How to get ACID transactions between almost any data stores, with the Epoxy protocol.
In the following series of blog posts I will document my attempts to write Linux modules using the Ada language. In part 1, I will demonstrate how to write in Ada and build a simple "hello world" Linux kernel module. Additionally, I will introduce a basic customized Ada runtime to support our "hello world" module…
Xe Iaso's personal website.
A retrospective on a NetBSD server set up in 2010 under tight deadlines, running almost untouched for over a decade on consumer-grade hardware-proof of the OS's remarkable stability.
(yet) tl;dr In a recent thread on Mastodon, it was revealed that Ubuntu 23.04 users can’t install the Steam deb package from the Ubuntu archive without jumping through some technical hoops. It turns out this was a mistake, a bug was filed, and future builds shouldn’t have this problem. It’s not immediately apparent…
Xe Iaso's personal website.
A solution to the problem of the growing number of mount points and loopback devices in (Ubuntu) Linux.
Elixir is the thing I do most of my public writing and speaking about. It is my default programming language for the last 5-6 years. It suits my brain. Performs well for the kind of work I typically do. And using it I have experienced very few drawbacks. Rather than writing yet another post trying to widely summarize…
It has been five months since my last general update on the Rust compiler’s performance. Let’s see what has happened in that time.
Here is a Go function, if_max(). It finds the max value of an array of integers. Simple enough:
Windows XP I have a lot of fond memories of Windows XP and after feeling nostalgic, I was happy to find out that it’s relatively easy to take it for a spin on an ARM64 Mac using QEMU. I decided to install XP and an assortment of classic software one final time, taking screenshots of the whole process. This included…
A couple of weeks ago, I was in an internal meeting where our CTO (Adam Prout) was giving a talk to our summer interns. The talk was about the current state of database companies, and how different providers are competing on different facets of their products. As the talk was
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Making it quicker and simpler to run a macOS VM: with Vimy all you need do is double-click its bundle, and the VM runs using its previous settings.
Why some report macOS updates as being more than 1 GB smaller than the figures given here. Don’t believe the size given by softwareupdate.
Though most strings online today follow the Unicode standard (e.g., using UTF-8), the Latin 1 standard is still in widespread inside some systems (such as browsers) as JavaScript strings are often stored as either Latin 1, UTF-8 or UTF-16 internally. Latin 1 captures the first 256 characters from the Unicode standard…
The original ANSI C standard, C89, introduced the concept of “undefined behavior,” which was used both to describe the effect of outright bugs like accessing memory in a freed object and also to capture the fact that existing implementations differed about handling certain aspects of the language, including use of…
For some of us, the backend vs frontend discussion just doesn’t cut it. What do do, then?
The Bhyve FreeBSD hypervisor (called/spelled ‘beehive’ usually) was created almost 10 years ago. Right now it offers speed and features that other similar solutions provide – such…
