The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 582 posts.
As an engineer who primarily works with data and databases I spend a lot of time moving data around, hashing it, compressing it, decompressing it and generally trying to shovel it between VMs and blob stores over TLS. I am constantly surprised by how many systems only support slow, inefficient, and expensive ways of…
In software, it is a common problem to want to remove specific characters from a string. To make the problem precise, let us consider the removal of all ASCII control characters and spaces. In practice, it means the removal of all byte values smaller or equal than 32. I covered a related problem before, the … Continue…
Shibboleths are historically a word or phrasing that indicate membership in a particular group or culture. I was introduced to the term in the West Wing where the President needed to verify the veracity of a person’s claims of religious persecution.
Welp, this is a weird blog post! Very unexpectedly, we quickly invalidated some of the core hypothesis that make Zaplib work as a startup.
Multi-variable optimization is an incredibly useful tool for writing software. It allows you to specify a desired result and delegate finding the solution to a reliable algorithm. If you know what you want but not how to get it, optimization can probably help. Problems with many interacting variables that are…
Redpanda is a Kafka -compatible distributed streaming system based around append-only logs. Compared to Kafka, Redpanda aims to offer users lower latencies and reduced operational complexity. It uses the Raft consensus algorithm internally, rather than depending on a separate installation of Zookeeper . Redpanda…
The Redox official website
This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth. After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of companies trying to figure out what to do…
I’ve been an SELinux complexity apologist for years. Lately, I’ve concluded that every implementation with difficult-to-configure policies is just unmanageable.
By Laura Nolan, with contributions from Glen D. Sanford, Jamie Scheinblum, and Chris Sullivan. Assessing conditions Slack experienced a major incident on February 22 this year, during which time many users were unable to connect to Slack, including the author — which certainly made my role as Incident Commander more…
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
In my last post I introduced an Emacs Lisp VM I was writing in Rust. My stated goal at the time was to complete a garbage collector. I think Rust has some really interesting properties that will make building garbage collectors easier and safer. Many of the techniques used in my GC are not original and have been…
I've never "got" the appeal of a Mac. But I have to use one for work. Here's a partial list of everything I cannot do on a Mac, but I can do on Ubuntu. These are all objective facts. These are things which either are impossible, or require adding unsupported 3rd party software - sometimes at a cost. Resize the system…
On Thursday, November 18, 2021, Dropbox did not go down. On a normal day this would be a non-event—a sign that everything was operating as usual. However, this day was anything but usual. At 5:00 pm PT, a group of Dropboxers were huddled on a Zoom call when the command was given to physically unplug our San Jose data…
From the 8 cores of the original M1 chip to the M1 Ultra’s 20, this is how macOS manages threads from apps, services and other code.
The upcoming Fedora release includes a change proposed by Peter Robinson and yours truly, that disables all the Frame Buffer Device (fbdev) drivers in the Linux kernel package. This means that star…
tl;dr: Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functioning system. Without it, sane memory management becomes harder to achieve.
Listen in on Jane Street’s Ron Minsky as he has conversations with engineers working on everything from clock synchronization to reliable multicast, build systems to reconfigurable hardware. Get a peek at how Jane Street approaches problems, and how those ideas relate to tech more broadly.
TL;DR; We are changing std::sort in LLVM’s libcxx. That’s a long story of what it took us to get there and all possible consequences, bugs you might encounter with examples from open so…
TL;DR : firmware support in Debian sucks, and we need to change this. See the "My preference, and rationale" Section below.
So unlike all the others, yet people think it's the normal one.
It does everything differently, because of course it does.
My feelings about OpenBSD and NixOS, trying to figure out where each is the best
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
It’s limited to 5 Gb/s, giving read rates of about 400 MB/s and writes at about 430 MB/s. Fine for Time Machine backups, but bad with NVMe drives.
Today, I would like to discuss a project that I care very deeply about: the musl libc. One of the most controversial and long-standing debates in the musl community is that musl does not define a p…
sysctl is a simple and great tool for modifying the kernel parameters. It does its job very well by providing an easy-to-use interface for /proc/sys. It is maintained as a part of procps toolkit for years and it can easily be considered a legacy tool today. So why not push it to its limits and turn it into a more…
