The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 391 posts.
SteamOS 3 (“Holo”) is the Arch-based Linux distribution built for the Steam Deck, Valve Software’s portable PC gaming device. It’s a very interesting Linux distribution even when you only focus on how it updates itself: updates are performed atomically by downloading a new read-only root filesystem to an inactive…
In the past few years, I've heard a lot about Avro, Parquet, ORC, Arrow and Feather, but I also keep hearing about Iceberg and Delta Lake. As a "database person", I’ve been struggling to understand all of these different things, and how they relate to Data Lakes and
Before Apple had even released its Developer Transition Kit, virtualisation was already one of the 3 pillars of software support on Apple silicon Macs.
I'm joev, a security engineer 👋 You may know me from my work at Apple or on Metasploit, or from my CVEs.
I recently finished reading PostgreSQL 14 Internals by Egor Rogov. It is one of the great books that teach applied computer science without watering down the difficult parts. One particularly interesting topic is PostgreSQL’s execution of UPDATE statements. Updates in relational databases are inherently complex. They…
The Thanksgiving long weekend (23-26 November) in 2023 was an interesting one for OpenZFS, that I managed to land myself in the middle of. The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system. It was a pretty…
Instead of using sshpass to non-interactively provide an SSH password, here is a simpler approach by harnessing the built-in features of OpenSSH...
In my last post, we explored how to build WASM modules, both with and without WASI support, using Clang. In a comment on Reddit, it was mentioned that much of the setup I walked through in that post could be avoided by just leveraging Zig’s WASI supprt. This is a great point, and I would recommend doing the same. The…
Pinterest's tech stack explained simply
The database zeitgeist has decided that ANSI SQL '92 isn't enough. We need something better.
A lightweight in-process SQL OLAP engine, powered by ClickHouse.
From pure Python to AVX-512 assembly, optimizing cosine similarity reveals a 2,500x speedup through SIMD, FP16, and VNNI instructions on modern Intel CPUs.
Figuring out how much parallelism your program can use is surprisingly tricky.
As regular readers of this blog will now, JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) is one of my favorite tools of the Java platform. This low-overhead event recording engine built into the JVM is invaluable for …
Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a 32-bit processor but also switching to a...
It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that…
How a mistake of less than half a millimeter in a single part nearly brought down the world’s largest passenger aircraft.
The C++ library has long been organized around stream classes, at least when it comes to reading and parsing strings. But streams can be surprisingly slow. For example, if you want to parse numbers, then this C++ routine is close to being the worst possible choice for performance: std::stringstream in(mystring)…
This is a complete tutorial for understanding the basics of Linux ext4 file system.
I was running some benchmarks the other day. I usually have a lot of things running (Teams, Chrome, IDE, etc…) but I have to close everything to run some tight benchmarks. When I am done, one of th…
Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip. In this blog post, I'll examine the clock-generati...
It is often said that Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery. Also, remember libcrurl? That was the name of the thing Google once planned to do: reimplement the libcurl API on top of their Chrome networking library. Flattery or not, it never went anywhere. The other day I received an email asking me about ……
Achieving Data Freedom Through Open Source and Rust
Another explainer on a fun, esoteric topic: optimizing code with SIMD (single instruction multiple data, also sometimes called vectorization ). Designing a good, fast, portable SIMD algorithm is not a simple matter and requires thinking a little bit like a circuit designer.
