The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
Goodbye, old friend. We’ve been traveling together since 2010, and you’ve faithfully served all my virtual machine needs well, first with VirtualBox and then later with libvirt and KVM . But, as they 1 say, all good things must pass.
Published: 05-07-2026 20:33 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
I spent a whole month researching FreeBSD's kernel's virtual memory system to understand why tools like htop, btop and fastfetch report different information about RAM usage. I ended up submitting patches to all of these projects.
What we lose when we no longer have to learn how our computers work.
Marcus Lewis
Microsoft is losing Builders fast. They're switching to MacOS and Linux. The biggest pull keeping people on Windows, outside of shear inertia, is content creation and gaming. However, even these are falling to Linux.
A Game Boy emulator runs faster than a native interpreter by dynamically recompiling SM83 to WebAssembly, effectively making JIT possible on iOS.
Tracing one vector-add kernel from nvcc all the way down to the warps that execute it.
Behold: the Guru of GNU ! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.) True enlightment only comes from a truly free computi...
At WWDC 2025, Apple announced macOS 26 Tahoe. One of the new features in macOS Tahoe is a new disk image format: ASIF. Designed for use with virtual machines (its documentation lives under the Virtualization framework), ASIF takes a lot of inspiration from existing virtual disk formats. Practically, that means it’s…
A fake-interview scam tried to backdoor my machine with PinpinRAT, hidden in a malicious TypeScript patch. Analysis of the attack, payload, and indicators of compromise.
The mind that builds software is far smaller than the software it builds, and almost everything good in engineering is a way of living with that gap.
If you happen to find yourself in a sysadmin position, or a position where you just so happen to maintain someone’s infrastructure , chances are that at some point in time the topic “we need a cache” comes up.
First, I want to tell you how exactly I got to this point and why I started researching different options for handling asynchronous I/O on Linux… Last year, my students and I built a reverse proxy server called TinyGate. It was super simple, worker-based, and it basically worked well. Of course, I didn’t expect it to…
Meet Alice. Alice uses your web service. Alice, like most humans, measures her time in seconds and minutes. Alice says your service is slow. You tell Alice that the mean request to your service completes in 100ms, but Alice says that her mean wait time is 1s.
The cost of thread context switch, including cache invalidation, can reach up to 3 million CPU cycles RTTI can be quite expensive, with dynamic_cast being up...
I have a system with c servers, each of which can only handle a single concurrent request, and has no internal queuing. The servers sit behind a load balancer, which contains an infinite queue. An unlimited number of clients offer c * 0.8 requests per second to the load balancer on average. In other words, we increase…
I’ve been running a mixed Proxmox cluster for years – four nodes of wildly different capability, from an Atom x5-Z8350 with 2 GB of RAM (a z83ii, currently ...
You'd think that given the same bytes of input you'd get the same bytes of output. lol. lmao. No, you don't. It's complicated.
I’ve been working on speeding up AVX-512 vertex decoding in meshoptimizer recently; in the process I stumbled upon two optimizations that I did not end up using but I thought they might be fun to write about! The optimizations that actually made it in require some higher level background / explanations that will have…
cybersecurity, tech, and personal annoyance log
TimescaleDB compression with hypercore - columnar storage with up to 98% ratio in PostgreSQL. segmentby/orderby configuration and a benchmark for IoT and time-series.
When I was a kid , computers weren’t coddled and left running 24/7, when you were done with them you switched them off, and when you wanted them again you just switched them on and within a second or so they’d be loading whatever was in their disk drive.
zeroserve is a high-performance HTTPS server that runs eBPF scripts in userspace ( intro ). Now it's got a Caddy-compat mode - when provided a Caddyfile, zeroserve JIT-compiles it to eBPF and then to native x86_64/ARM64 machine code, and runs it in an io_uring event loop.
In 1994 I got my first computer: an Intel i486 DX2-66 with 4 MB RAM and a 512MB harddisk. The software was IBMs OS/2 and Microsofts Windows 3.11. In the next four years I was upgrading this machine every few months with more RAM (up to 16MB), a CD-ROM-drive and a soundblaster card. So I learned upgrading this machine…
The historic go-to solution for network booting is PXE. PXE is based on DHCP and TFTP. It is tricky to correctly configure, even trickier to make it highly available and good luck with the security with this clear-text unsigned protocol.
Last year I've fixed a bug in Linux kernel OHCI (USB 1.1) stack , which rendered my old printer unreliable: OHCI adds artificial delay of 1ms for each USB transfer of send-read pattern, while my very old, host-based printer expects very tight timings and constant latency, like some kind of CnC machine.
Linux latency on the desktop and in games compared to Windows. Network streaming with Sunshine and Moonlight. Tuning the KWin compositor for lower latencies.
An introduction to my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad addiction Over 10 years ago I got my first ThinkPad x60. I got interested in free software by reading the about GNU …
Evidence-indexed documentation of TI-84 Plus OS 2.55MP ROM behavior and hardware interfaces.
