The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
When we launched S3 back in 2006, I discussed its virtually unlimited capacity (“…easily store any number of blocks…”), the fact that it was designed to provide 99.99% availability, and that it offered durable storage, with data transparently stored in multiple locations. Since that launch, our customers have used S3…
Databases shed important RDMS features as they get big. Examining why this tends to be the case, and some ideas for preventing it.
This is not a technical documentation for how I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD. This is a high-level for why I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD.
I was inspired by the release of Apple’s M1 ARM processor to tweet about the perils of lock-free programming which led to some robust discussion. The discussion went pretty well given the inanity o…
Ethical Hacking and Cybersecurity Blog
x86 is back in the general programmer discourse, in part thanks to Apple’s M1 and Rosetta 2 . As such, I figured I’d do yet another x86-64 post.
Notes on Interval Tree Clocks
If we were to start over from first principles, what would I do differently than k8s?
As you may already know, Apple deprecated the OpenGL rendering library in macOS Mojave and provided the Metal framework as a replacement. Metal better reflects the shift in CPU/GPU performance that ha
ScyllaDB’s Glauber Costa explains how two new APIs, io_uring and eBPF, are changing the fundamental nature of Linux programming.
My first computer was a BBC Micro. It could do basic graphics at a resolution of 640×256 - with 8 different colours. Not a typo. Eight! The mono speaker produced bleeps and bloops. It was basic, in all senses of the word. Eventually, talented hackers found a way for it to do simplistic 3D graphics and even speech…
Why does it take 2 years to realise that macOS has been checking signing certificate validity online?
This page describes a TCP performance problem resulting from a little-known interaction between Nagle’s Algorithm and Delayed ACK. At least, I believe it’s not well known: I haven’t seen it documented elsewhere, yet in the course of my career at Apple I have run into the performance problem it causes over and over…
Blog posts about GNU Guix.
Most PCs tend to boot from a primary media storage, be it a hard disk drive, or a solid-state drive, perhaps from a network, or – if all else fails – the USB stick or the boot DVD comes to the rescue… Fun, eh? Boring! Why don’t we try to boot from a record player for a change?
This is a briefing on SQLite intended for Linux kernel hackers, and especially those working on Linux filesystems.
A lot of tech discussion these days is focused around scaling infrastructures to handle huge traffic. But it's important not to forget how far simple optimizations can go.
Wayland is still lacking proper consideration for color management & support for high dynamic range (HDR) imagery. However, a group of renegade devs has begun an effort to fix this situation.
If you have followed Windows 10 at all during the last few years, you know that the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL for short, is the hot topic among developers. You can finally run your Linux tooling on Windows as a first class citizen, which means you no longer have to learn PowerShell or, god forbid, suffer…
This is the story of the time I wrote some code, deployed it to production, and ended up bricking the server it was running on by frying the kernel. Beautiful rendition of me frying the kernel This post is about perils of concurrency and...
Achieving 100 Gbps intrusion prevention on a single server, Zhao et al., OSDI’20 Papers-we-love is hosting a mini-event this Wednesday (18th) where I’ll be leading a panel discussion including one …
“Computers are all made out of logic gates”. We’ve heard that saying before. We also have a sense that logic gates are very simple machines, analogous to light switches even. This raises the question: how exactly do kind-of-light-switches come together to form computers ? How does “storing a variable” or “calling a…
