The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,948 posts.
For the past few years, I've been building and operating a large distributed system: the payments system at Uber [https://eng.uber.com/payments-platform/]. I've learned a lot about distributed architecture concepts…
December 2020 Update: Lo and behold, the Pi Foundation tacitly acknowledges the Pi needs a fan in the official case, because now they sell the Case Fan! The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pi 4 announcement blog post touted the Pi 4 as providing "PC-like level of performance for most users". The Foundation even offers a…
Abhinav Jangda, Bobby Powers, Emery D. Berger, and Arjun Guha, University of Massachusetts Amherst
BPF Performance Tools: Linux System and Application Observability (book)
This post is about uninitialized memory, but also about the semantics of highly optimized “low-level” languages in general. I will try to convince you that reasoning by “what the hardware d...
You may have heard about Fedora Silverblue, the next-generation desktop OS. This article gives you a more complete view about what it is and how it works.
On 2019-07-10, the Stripe API was severely degraded. Two different database bugs and a configuration change caused a cascading failure over several critical services. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.
A paper on debugging non-deterministic concurrency issues interactively.
Almost nine years ago, Cloudflare was a tiny company and I was a customer not an employee. Cloudflare had launched a month earlier and one day alerting told me that my little site, jgc.org, didn’t seem to have working DNS any more.
Why BPF and XDP are something you should learn.
Lightweight virtualization is a natural fit for low power devices and, so, seeing that the extremely popular Raspberry Pi line got an upgrade, we were very keen on trying the newly released Raspberry Pi 4 model B. Getting the board up and running with a 64bit kernel (and a 64bit userland) proved to be kind of a…
Note: I also posted a separate review of some A2 'Application Performance' class cards, see this post: A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi. As a part-time tinkerer and full-time developer, I have been fascinated by single board computers (SBCs) since the first Raspberry Pi was…
After the daily dose of Hackaday - and with an idea that seemed very doable, and actually, with some improvements can be easily reproducible.
The database is usually the most critical part of a software architecture and managing databases, especially relational ones, has never been easy. For this reason, we created Amazon Aurora Serverless, an auto-scaling version of Amazon Aurora that automatically starts up, shuts down and scales up or down based on your…
List of changes and new features merged in the Linux kernel during the 5.2 development cycle
It's a C test. If you think you know C, take this test. It only has 5 questions.
This page lists some of the changes I make to a vanilla install of FreeBSD for security hardening. Some changes to increase network performance or make things a bit more sane are also included. It only covers basic changes that a sysadmin can make to a running system.
Not every code injection bug is a security hole.
Solaris'd... This morning I got an email from our group manager asking about a UNIX server...
I had a student (Fred Smith) who worked on extensions to Popcorn (the predecessor to Cyclone) that supported run-time code generation in a lightweight fashion. Here’s a paper describing part of the system: https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/5812 . Fred’s thesis had a bunch more.
Starting at 1342 UTC today we experienced a global outage across our network that resulted in visitors to Cloudflare-proxied domains being shown 502 errors (“Bad Gateway”). The cause of this outage was deployment of a single misconfigured rule within the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Good judgement is the result of experience ... Experience is the result of bad judgement. — Fred Brooks
M. Stoeckl's website
(First, as a public service message, if you're running Linux on a G5 you may wish to update the kernel .) I'm a big fan of NetBSD . I've ru...
Machine learning systems are stuck in a rut Barham & Isard, HotOS’19 In this paper we argue that systems for numerical computing are stuck in a local basin of performance and programmabil…
