The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
Wayland has been a broad misdirection and misallocation of time and developer resources at the expense of users. With more migration from other operating systems, the pressure to fix fundamental problems has become more prominent. After 17 years of development, now is a good time to reflect on some of the larger…
How an undefined behavior in C made me pull my hair out for days but became my first patch to the Linux kernel!
Modern processors have the ability to execute many instructions per cycle, on a single core. To be able to execute many instructions per cycle in practice, processors predict branches. I have made the point over the years that modern CPUs have an incredible ability to predict branches. It makes benchmarking difficult…
A system freeze led us deep into Linux spinlock internals, where we helped find not one but three bugs in the kernel's resilient locking code used by eBPF.
I built a tiny shell in C to learn what fork, execvp, and dup2 are doing under the hood.
I don't normally do follow-ups and never this quick. After posting that last article, it was fun to read the comments on Reddit and Hacker News as they rolled in. I even found other discussions . I couldn't help wonder, "Could I have made it even more performant?" . After heading home I decided to take another look.
A personal reflection on my first encounter with FreeBSD in 2002, how it shaped the way I design and run systems, and why its philosophy, stability, and community still matter to me more than twenty years later.
A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.
Once in a while new hardware is released that makes a difference. Such a device is the Intel Optane series of high-performance SSD’s for professional use, which was released in late 2017. In this case I’m talking about the Intel Optane P4800X and P5800X and their consumer counterparts ( 900P and 905P ). All drives are…
Traditional Wayland compositors have a monolithic architecture that combines the compositor and window manager into a single program. This has the downside of requiring Wayland window managers to do the significant work of implementing an entire Wayland compositor as well.
So where has the last six months gone ? I was planning on getting images done for Fedora 44 Beta but I was unwell and busy and ran out of time. So what better time to get them out than Pi Day! .
The story goes like this. ComputerCraft is a mod that adds programming to Minecraft. You write Lua code that gets executed by a bespoke interpreter with access to world APIs, and now you’re writing code instead of having fun. Computers have limited disk space, and my /nix folder is growing out of control, so I need to…
JPEG is a clever image compression algorithm that exploits a human perceptual bias and the structure of natural images. It makes a change of basis before encoding so that the rewritten image representation concentrates the signal that humans are most perceptive to, and thus, the remaining details can be discarded…
This one is going to be a quick one as there wasn't anything new discovered. In fact, I feel quite dumb. This is really a tale of " Do your research before acting and know what your goal is, " as you'll end up saving yourself a lot of time. Nobody likes throwing away work they've done either, and there could be…
143 vs 36 minutes is far too big difference
Python loses every public benchmark by 21-875x. I took the exact problems people use to dunk on Python and climbed every rung of the optimization ladder -- from CPython version upgrades to Rust. Real numbers, real code, real effort costs.
Why 'indirection has a cost' is usually the wrong reason to inline and what actually costs you.
In the previous article we explored how Go’s memory allocator manages heap memory — grabbing large arenas from the OS, dividing them into spans and size classes, and using a three-level hierarchy (mcache, mcentral, mheap) to make most allocations lock-free. A key detail was that each P (processor) gets its own memory…
Introduction An obscure quirk of the /proc/*/mem pseudofile is its “punch through” semantics. Writes performed through this file will succeed even if the destination virtual memory is marked unwritable. In fact, this behavior is intentional and actively used by projects such as the Julia JIT compiler and rr debugger…
NOTE June 2026: Hetzner announced over 100% increases in prices. They will honour old prices for instances built before June 15th 2026, but for new instances the performance/price ratios show below are no longer valid.
a digital garden by daniel phiri
Back in January, the ThunderScope team sent me a PCIe card version of their prototype open hardware oscilloscope.
what's a few systemd services in initramfs between friends?
Let's talk about the "Windows Baseline Security Mode," too.
Maybe the code shouldn't be the only documentation?
Why is my first C++ (m)allocation always 72 KB?? It’s the ’emergency pool’ for exceptions, here’s how I uncovered it using GDB and digging through the source code of libstdc++, glibc and Valgrind!
Although I have to have a machine running macOS Tahoe to support our customers, I personally don't like the look of Liquid Glass, nor do I like some of the functional changes Apple has made in macOS Tahoe.
The memory management in DOS is simple, but that simplicity may be deceptive. There are several rather interesting pitfalls that programming documentation often does not mention.
