The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 555 posts.
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…
How to modernize C arrays for greater memory safety: a case-study in refactoring the Linux kernel and a look to the future Kees Cook C i...
The Go Execution Tracer (aka runtime/trace) was designed to achieve low enough overhead to be usable on “a server in production serving live traffic”. This is achieved by writing events into per-P buffers, using RDTSC for timestamps, and encoding into a relatively efficient binary format.
We are reverting this change for now. More details to follow. The default compression for Git archives has recently changed. As result, archives downloaded from GitHub may have different checksums…
I wrote about forking Chrome to turn HTML to SVG two months ago, today we're going to do something similar by making it render into a terminal.
I always wanted to understand how a CPU works, how it transitions from one instruction to the next and makes a computer work. So I thought: let's implement one and run a C program on it.
I recently came up with a "clever" idea to eliminate one jump from an inner loop, and was surprised to find that it slowed things down. Allow me to explain my terrible error, so that you don't fall victim in the future.
While working on my Windows 3.x display driver , I ran into a vexing problem. In Windows 3.1 running in Enhanced 386 mode, I could start a DOS session and switch it to a window. But an attempt to set a mode in the DOS window (e.g. MODE CO80 ) would destroy the Windows desktop, preventing further drawing from happening…
How retrowin32 works, at a high level.
I am now a staunch advocate for ECC RAM, after the events of last week. You see, over the last several weeks my main desktop workstation has been misbehaving, with occasional freezing and crashing. After some diagnostics I began to suspect a faulty RAM module, and sure enough, upon performing a quick run of memtest86…
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…
[Updated on 2023-01-24: add a small section on Distillation.] Large transformer models are mainstream nowadays, creating SoTA results for a variety of tasks. They are powerful but very expensive to train and use. The extremely high inference cost, in both time and memory, is a big bottleneck for adopting a powerful…
Xe Iaso's personal website.
Nearly all programs are written to access virtual memory addresses, which the CPU must translate to physical addresses. These translations are usually fast because the mappings are cached in the CPU's Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) . Unfortunately, virtual memory on x86 has used a 4 kiB page size since the 386 was…
I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the <Win> key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. On my powerful laptop (SSD and 32 GB of RAM) th…
A few months ago I got to debug and fix an interesting bug in the Csharp virtual terminal library VtNetCore . We use VtNetCore at BastionZero to extract terminal commands in realtime from user terminal sessions as they flow over the wire. This requires feeding the standard out and standard err of a terminal session…
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…
New year, new RISC-V Yocto blog post \o/ When I wrote my last post, I did really not expect my brand new VisionFive-2 board to find its way to me so soon… But well, a week ago it was suddenly…
C++, a "Reality sandwich", and an Octopus.
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…
In this article, you can find how setting the TZ environment variable can prevent thousands of system calls.
This article explores how terminal emulators function, decoding the process of sending commands to the shell for execution. Unveil the mystery behind what happens when you open a terminal and enter Is.
Over the past years I attended hundreds of interviews. Many candidates proudly told tales on how they develop their projects with a microservice architecture. Often (I don’t want to say “always”, but from my memory I think it actually is “always”) it does not require many questions to see that they used a rocket…
Since this article contains a lot of interactive demos relying on fairly modern browser technology, let's make sure that everything is OK before continuing.
