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Near-lossless image formats using ultra-fast LZ codecs
I think simple ultra-high speed lossy (or near-lossless) image codecs, built from the new generation of fast LZ codecs, are going to become ...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 555 posts.
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Optimizing Open Addressing
Your default hash table should be open-addressed, using Robin Hood linear probing with backward-shift deletion. When prioritizing deterministic performance over memory efficiency, two-way chaining is also a good choice.
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15k inserts/s with Rust and SQLite (2021)
There is this growing sentiment in tech that stacking more and more layers of complexity to reach the sacrosanct "infinite scalability" is not the way forward. First, because it rarely materializes: you need a lot of other things than fancy tech to reach millions of people. Second, because the tradeoffs
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The secret life of fsync
Random thoughts on concurrency, databases and…2023124 points62 commentsSystems & Performance details
What kind of durability guarantees fsync system call provides in Linux? Let's find out.
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Clocks and Causality – Ordering Events in Distributed Systems (2022)
In distributed systems, logical clocks play a key role in the ordering of system events. What are the various logical clock designs, and how do they help with event ordering? This article answers these questions.
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SSD as Long Term Storage Testing
2022 September 10 What is the best media for long term storage is a question that I read frequently from online forums. First and foremost, as far as I’m aware there is no real “set it and forget it” long term storage. In this digital age, data needs to be validated regularly and cycled to a new media every 5-10 years…
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Quicker serverless Postgres connections
Neon’s serverless driver redirects the PostgreSQL TCP wire protocol over WebSockets. This makes ordinary, fully-functional PostgreSQL connections accessible from new environments — including serverless platforms like Cloudflare Workers and Vercel Edge Functions. A key feature of these environments is that state is not…
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Your "simulation" might not need state
The bouncing DVD logo is a fun and easy coding project. Watching Daniel Shiffman code it in p5.js is one of my earliest programming memories. However, the naive solution is far from optimal.
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A brief history of APFS (2022)
Born secretly on 27 March 2017, it was Apple’s biggest gamble. Introduced in High Sierra, it didn’t work on Fusion Drives and had other problems. Also explains version numbering.
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Parsing the .DS_Store File Format (2018)
About two years ago I came across a .DS_Store file and wanted to extract its information (e.g. file names). After researching the file format and its security implications, as well as writing a parser for it, I would like to share my (limited) knowledge and the parser in Go / Python with the world. You might want to…
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Benchmarking Cheap SSDs for Fun, No Profit
The price of Solid-state drives (SSDs) has dropped significantly over the last few years. It's now possible to buy a 1TB solid-state drive for less than €60. However, at such low price points, there is a catch.
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Linux is Making Apple Great Again
My personal website and blog
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Understanding Glibc Malloc (2015)
I always got fascinated by heap memory. Questions such as How heap memory is obtained from kernel? How efficiently memory is managed? Is it managed by kernel or by library or by application itself?…
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AI’s compute fragmentation: what matrix multiplication teaches us
AI is powered by a virtuous circle of data, algorithms (“models”), and compute. Growth in one pushes needs in the others and can grossly affect the developer experience on aspects like usability and performance. Today, we have more data and more AI model research than ever before, but compute isn’t scaling at the same…
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Butler Virtual Operating System
This post introduces [[butler]], a virtual operating system that runs multi-players applications on the web. In two parts, I present:
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Practical Libc-free threading on Linux
Suppose you’re not using a C runtime on Linux, and instead you’re programming against its system call API. It’s long-term and stable after all. Memory management and buffered I/O are easily solved, but a lot of software benefits from concurrency. It would be nice to also have thread spawning capability. This article…
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The Unix process API is unreliable and unsafe (2021)
It is difficult to write software which reliably and safely manages processes on Unix; this is because of flaws in the API. I know of no Unix system which has solved these problems, but in this article I'll be specifically talking about the Linux process API.
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Strong Consistency with Raft and SQLite
In the recent past, a typical client/server environment consisted of multiple clients connected to a central database server. A central database architecture is a system where all data is stored in a single centralized location. When client A from Si...
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Paving the Road to Vulkan on Asahi Linux
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
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When can two TCP sockets share a local address?
If I navigate to https://blog.cloudflare.com/, my browser will connect to a remote TCP address from the local IP address assigned to my machine, and a randomly chosen local TCP port. What happens if I then decide to head to another site?
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Libreboot 20230319 Released
Libreboot – Libreboot 20230319 released!
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The curious case of a memory leak in a Zig program
Digs into a unexpected memory leak when using Zig's FixedBufferAllocator
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PostgreSQL Logical Replication Explained
Vigneshwaran C explained the internals of PostgreSQL Logical Replication during PGConf India - if you were not able to attend, you can read all here.
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JDK 20 G1/Parallel/Serial GC Changes
Yet another JDK release that is on track - JDK 20 GA is almost here . Another opportunity to summarize changes and improvements in Hotspot´s stop-the-world garbage collectors for the JDK 20 release.
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Vulnerabilities in the TPM 2.0 reference implementation code
In this blog post we discuss the details of two vulnerabilities we discovered in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 reference implementation code. These two vulnerabilities, an out-of-bounds write (CVE-2023-1017) and an out-of-bounds read (CVE-2023-1018), affected several TPM 2.0 software implementations (such as…
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Using a Mac without a network connection
New version of ViableS runs in a sandbox, with no shared folders, and can now be isolated from networks. So how well does Ventura work without internet?
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PostgreSQL 14 Internals
I’m excited to announce that the translation of the “ PostgreSQL 14 Internals ” book is finally complete thanks to the amazing work of Liudmila Mantrova. The final part of the book considers each of the index types in great detail. It explains and demonstrates how access methods, operator classes, and data types work…