The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 498 posts.
When we implemented the git portion of Sublime Merge , we chose to use mmap for reading git object files. This turned out to be considerably more difficult than we had first thought. Using mmap in desktop applications has some serious caveats, and here's why:
Your CPU has a 32-bit addition instruction that computes the sum of two 32-bit integers x and y, producing a 32-bit result. (The 33rd bit of the sum, the "carry bit", is usually thrown away.)
Almost every one of you must have written a program, compiled it and then ran it to see the fruits of your hard labour. It feels good to finally see your program working, isn’t it? But to make all of this work, we have someone else to thankful too. And that is your compiler (of course, assuming that you are working in…
It seems like it was just six months ago that we announced Fedora 29, and here we are again. Today, we announce our next operating system release. Even though it went so quickly, a lot has happened in the last half year, and you’ll see the results in Fedora 30. If you’re impatient, go to […]
TL;DR: Use C99’s designated initializers instead. Because it’s 2019! Edit: This post was discussed on Hacker News, Lobste.rs and /r/c_programming. It has been updated to address some of the concerns raised by commenters. One of the little things that annoy me when reading code is the unnecessary use of memset() to…
pgDash is an in-depth monitoring solution designed specifically for PostgreSQL deployments. pgDash shows you information and metrics about every aspect of your PostgreSQL database server, collected using the open-source tool pgmetrics.
This post explores unit and integration testing in no_std executables. We will use Rust’s support for custom test frameworks to execute test functions…
Today, we'd like to share some of our recent work on Sherlock that allowed a pretty significant speedup when listing files in directories with a lot of entries. > Unlike our usual announcements, this post is more of a behind-the-scenes...
Here is an outline of some of architectural issues addressed as we build YugabyteDB, our high-performance distributed SQL database.
Our servers manage heaps of network packets, from legit traffic to big DDoS attacks. For top efficiency, we adopted eXpress Data Path (XDP), a Linux kernel tool for swift, low-level packet handling.
I have long wanted to create my own desktop operating system targeting the Raspberry Pi. I believe we should have a hackable desktop environment that is both powerful and lightweight, similar to BeOS and the Amiga. To build this desktop we really need full control over how apps draw to the screen, but still have…
The V8 team details their analysis and mitigation strategy for Spectre, one of the top computer security issues of 2018.
So many possible introductions to this one: Windows 7: Sheesh, I sure am slow at creating processes Windows 10: Hold my beer… Or how about: A) How long does CreateProcess take on Windows? B) How lo…
Jonathan Blow of “The Witness” fame likes to talk about just typing the obvious code first. Usually it will turnout to be fast enough. If it doesn’t, you c...
Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys’19 On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs enviro…
Time protection: the missing OS abstraction Ge et al., EuroSys’19 Ever since the prominent emergence of timing-based microarchitectural attacks (e.g. Spectre, Meltdown, and friends) I’ve been…
Posted by Mark Brand, Exploit Technique Archaeologist.IntroductionAfter discovering a collection ...
It has been almost 9 months since I started my sabbatical work with the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB team. I knew what I signed up for then...
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
Today, we’re excited to report the availability of our ARM64-native build of Firefox for Snapdragon-powered Windows 10 Always Connected PCs in our beta release channel, a channel aimed at developers or early tech adopters to test upcoming features before they’re released to consumers.
