The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 543 posts.
Recently I encountered a bug so cute that I immediately knew that I will want to share it on my blog. It was one of those bugs that even Rust can’t save you from. It occurred in HyperQueue (HQ), a distributed task scheduler written in Rust that I work on.
Notes on using the Z3 constraint solver with the Clang Static Analyzer
I’d like to talk more about a container technology that I really like that I touched upon in a previous article : systemd-nspawn .
What should you do with your unclosed browser tabs? I ran pong in mine.
By examining the limits of reasonable user behavior and embracing imperfection for users who go beyond it, we can continue to provide service that meets the expectations of users without sacrificing scalability of the system.
About a year ago, Hetzner launched the AX162 server line. It offered better price / performance than its predecessor, AX161. We were very excited to adopt it, but we soon encountered serious reliability issues. We observed that the new servers had 16 times higher annual failure rates.
There is oft-quoted advice that Kafka does poorly as a job queue. I’ve experienced this myself, and I wanted to formalize it a bit.
This app has a surprising number of anti-debugging protections. Let's figure out how to bypass them.
We discuss how to make sure that your access to TLS (thread-local storage) is fast, and how the presence of constructors and shared libraries affects the access time.
Oh look what you just made there.
Adventures in programming, hardware, DSP, and chiptune
Yesterday I read this toot (German) over on mastodon which starts with “IPv6 is hard.” No it’s not. It’s different. I ran across this multiple times: There is an A and an AAAA-record for a FQDN, but the web server is only reachable via IPv4. You can easily test this with curl $ curl -4 https://github.com -o /dev/null…
At Terrateam, we are big fans of Fly.io. The service is hosted there and it’s served us well. Just deploy your TOML file, get your infrastructure, do something else with the rest of your day. One of the interesting sides of Fly is that they invest heavily in server-side SQLite. They’ve written a number of blog posts…
Read on to learn how we used network packet captures and BPF to debug web server performance, ultimately uncovering a Linux kernel performance issue. This investigation was a collaboration between myself and my colleagues.
Go 1.24 enhances WebAssembly capabilities with function export and reactor mode
So a bit under 3 years ago, I made my infamous Wayland rant post that is likely the most read post on this blog by miles. I should really actually write about music again one of these days, but that's a topic for another time. The language was perhaps a bit inflammatory, but I felt the criticisms I made at the time…
Can we have a faster FFI for CRuby? Yes.
WebAssembly is a true write-once-run-anywhere experience.
Talking about my description of tech as “boring” to be a compliment, and how to think about it.
The Rust language ecosystem is growing each day, its popularity increasing, and with good reason. It’s the only mainstream language that provides memory and concurrency safety at compile time…
Training LLMs often feels like alchemy, but understanding and optimizing the performance of your models doesn't have to. This book aims to demystify the science of scaling language models: how TPUs (and GPUs) work and how they communicate with each other, how LLMs run on real hardware, and how to parallelize your…
Can Rust replace C? This is a question that has been on my mind for many years,as I created and now am tech lead forupb, a C libraryfor Protocol Buffers. Th...
High-quality sound in FreeBSD: system parameters, bitperfect signal, real-time operation, equalizer, MPD, FFmpeg filters.
The other day, while wasting time reading reddit, I stumbled upon a blogpost mentioning S3 FIFO, a method claiming to outperform LRU (Least Recently Used) in terms of cache miss ratio. Notable companies like RedPandas, Rising Wave, and Cloudflare have already implemented it in various capacities, so this piqued my…
Bytedance, a global technology company operating a wide range of content platforms around the world at massive scale, faced significant challenges in ensuring performance and stability across its data centers. With over a million servers running containerized applications, the company required a networking solution…
Date: 2025-01-26 Git: https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00016-wayland-input-latency.md
Databases are global, shared, mutable state. That’s the way it has been since the 1960s, and no amount of NoSQL has changed that. However, most self-respecting developers have got rid of mutable global variables in their code long ago. So why do we tolerate databases as they are?
When the topic of Rails performance comes up, it is commonplace to hear that the database is the bottleneck, so Rails applications are IO-bound anyway, hence Ruby performance doesn’t matter that much, and all you need is a healthy dose of concurrency to make your service scale. But how true is this in general?
