The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.
We recently passed the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene and its devastating impact on Western North Carolina. As a web developer, I am thinking again about my experience with the mobile web on the day after the storm.
Wayland is the successor to the X server (X11, Xorg) to implement the graphics stack on Linux. The Wayland project was actually started in 2008, a year before I created the i3 tiling window manager for X11 in 2009 — but for the last 18 years (!), Wayland was never usable on my computers. I don’t want to be stuck on…
Lots of the CVE world seems to focus on “security bugs” but I’ve found that it is not all that well known exactly how the Linux kernel security process works. I gave a talk about this back in 2023 and at other conferences since then, attempting to explain how it works, but I also thought it would be good to explain…
Prototyping a Home NAS with RAID1 on FreeBSD on a virtual machine: system installation via SSH with bsdinstall, configuring ZFS mirror and working with datasets
Happy New Year, and Welcome to Gas Town!
How I enabled the PowerVR GPU on the TH1520 SoC by writing the missing kernel drivers.
Years ago, I maintained a big C++ codebase at my day job. This product was the bread winner for the company and offered a public HTTP API for online payments. We are talking billions of euros of processed payments a year.
Introducing kv, a statically allocated key/value server.
A problem I experienced when pursuing my PhD and submitting academic articles was that I had built solutions to problems that required dramatic scale to be effective and worthwhile. Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist; however, I had observed them during my time within…
If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to th…
> In banking, telecom, and payments, reliability is not a nice to have. It is table stakes. The most reliable systems I have worked on reduce entire classes of bugs before the code even runs. Function...
This is a follow-up to making the rav1d video decoder 1% faster, where we compared profiler snapshots of rav1d (the Rust implementation) and dav1d (the C …
Try the first release of the QNX Developer Desktop, a self‑hosted QNX development environment that eliminates cross‑compilation for faster workflows.
In preparation for a future project, I was thinking about at the unix find utility . It operates a file system hierarchies, with basic operations selected and filtered using a specialized expression language. Users compose operations using unary and binary operators, grouping with parentheses for precedence. find may…
The rationale and transition period to moving to the new “core:os”
I bought a MacBook Air M2. As of writing, it's very affordable with the 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 13.6" model available for $750. As of writing, also Asahi Linux doesn't support anything newer than M2.
Sometimes compilers can surprise and delight even a jaded old engineer like me
At Waymo, our mission is to be the world’s most trusted driver. We know trust is built through consistent behavior over time—earned through every mile we drive and every interaction we have with the community. This past Saturday, as a widespread PG&E outage cut power to nearly one-third of San Francisco, our service…
We analyzed if AWS’ N. Virginia region remains the least reliable in 2025. Overview of outages, affected services, and the massive October 20 AWS incident, with insights from StatusGator’s real-time monitoring.
Time seems simple. But we engineers lose sleep over something as basic as keeping clocks in sync. Here’s why…
Or: How JPEG Screenshots Defeated Our Beautiful H.264 WebCodecs Pipeline
Ever since I got AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question: What's the point? The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That's not much. Especially considering a modern desktop has at least one slot with 16 lanes of…
What does a relational database designed specifically for local SSDs look like? Postgres, MySQL, SQLite and many others were invented in the 90s and 00s, the era of spinning disks. A local NVMe SSD has ~1000x improvement in both throughput and latency. Design decisions like write-ahead logs, large page sizes, and…
Recently a colleague mentioned building NixOS images that run unchanged on multiple architectures. Given the past adventures on this blog with systemd-repart and cross-compiling NixOS, I decide to give this a go.
Don't you love misleading documentation?
The Linux kernel has a feature where you can tune the behavior of memory allocations: the vm.overcommit_memory sysctl. When overcommit is enabled (sadly, this is the default), the kernel will typically return a mapping when brk(2) or mmap(2) is called to increase a program’s heap size, regardless of whether or not…
Model minimalistically Start from a tiny core, and always keep a working model as you extend. Your default should be omission. Add a compone...
How I investigated and worked around a kernel bug that caused async-profiler to freeze my machine whenever I tried to use a profiler.
A programming blog written by Vaxry.
ICU gets Unicode right and pays for it. This post shows a different approach: fold-safe windows, SIMD probes, and verifiers for fast UTF‑8 search.
