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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 518 posts.
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Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account
Arch Linux ARM on the ASUS ProArt P16, with a bootable installer, published Windows comparisons, and local Qwen inference.
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Big Fish: Exploiting a 37-Year-Old Kernel Bug in OpenBSD
Big fish. Small counter. Root shell.
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Libreboot 26.10 "Ominous Olive" released with UEFI, Chromebook support
Libreboot – Libreboot 26.10 “Ominous Olive” released! With full UEFI support.
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Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack
Oxide's approach to emulation, simulation, and tiny versions of big things.
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Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
My TP-Link EAP770 v1 corrupts downloads over Wi-Fi and TP-Link EOL'd it before I unboxed it. The fix is two zeros in sysfs. TP-Link's shell won't let me write them, so I wrote a kernel exploit for my own fucking access point.
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Who is vfmaddrnd231pd?
vfmaddrnd231pd is a unique instruction from the FMA instruction set. Most instructions in that set have mnemonics like vfmadd231pd, but here rnd means something very specific. The Intel Software Development Manual documents it as: VFMADDRND231PD – Fused Multiply-Add of Packed Double-Precision Floating-Point Values…
38
Postgres isn't slow, your storage is
A recap of Sai Srirampur's POSETTE 2026 talk on storage performance in Postgres, with a local NVMe vs. EBS benchmark and the production setup behind it.
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How I reverse engineered a commercial spatial audio effect
Measuring a commercial spatial audio processor, extracting its stereo impulse responses, and rebuilding the effect as a convolution filter on Linux.
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The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME
I was playing with the nono agent sandboxing tool and it greeted me with a warning: PATH entries the sandbox can write to: ~/.local/bin/ which looked suspicious.
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LineageOS 24
You know what's funnier than 24?
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Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster
DuckDB 2.0 alpha vs 1.5.5 on one laptop: recursive CTEs up to 90x, VARIANT 6x faster than JSON text, async I/O 2.4x on S3. What changes, and how to model data to get the speedup. | Reading time: 15 min read
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Unikernels were hard. key word: were
Justin Cormack, who worked on MirageOS back in the day, called me at the pub to talk about why unikernels are coming back. The friction that made them hard is gone, the operating system is design debt, and if you care about security you should seriously consider them.
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WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload
With the release of the WSL 3.x stack, Microsoft bumped the default virtualization runtime and advanced the shipped guest kernel from the 6.6 LTS branch up to 6.18. WSL upgrades often claim generalized performance gains, but marketing bullet points rarely translate directly to developer workloads. To see what actually…
45
A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU
Update (28th of September 2026) Max Desiatov told me that the @c swift attribute should work, instead of declaring the functions using @_cdecl. The @c attribute marks a global function as a C function implemented in Swift, which formalizes the @_cdecl attribute. A link to the proposal is available here. I did update…
46
Resurrecting iChat audio and video conferencing
Bringing back mid-2000s Video conferencing in Apple iChat
47
Benchmark in Milliseconds
How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons:
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A 40ms Go garbage collector pause caused by swap
I’m writing this so you don’t slap your forehead like I almost did when I decided to run swap in production to absorb memory spikes.
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The Forgetful CPU (Linux on M4)
This blog post goes into quite some detail about how I first booted Linux on my M4 Mac mini. I encourage you to look up terms and concepts you don’t know, since I cannot explain all the background in this post ;)
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Pi 1.0
Today we are shipping Pi 1.0, a hardened, minimal, extensible agent harness, alongside Pi Durable, a new experimental substrate for long-running agentic applications.
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Pi Durable
Pi Durable is a new experimental package for long-running, durable, and malleable agents that can run anywhere. A tour of what we built and why.
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How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026
My last post on the Rust compiler’s performance was two months ago and a lot has happened since then.
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5x faster Edge Functions: V8 isolates to Firecracker MicroVMs
See how Netlify rebuilt Edge Functions on MicroVMs to deliver lower latency, greater reliability, and faster log delivery.
54
cp: -r or -R?
A question like this recently came up again. I once tried to find an answer, but only posted it in some "forum" a decade ago, and I think it's worth saving this little bit of trivia from digital nirvana.
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Systems that no one will test
(this post figured on HNews here) This happened to me in 2020, and it has been on my mind again lately. During the worst of the pandemic, I found a vulnerability in a system that gave me access to the Brazilian federal system, and with that access I was able to retrieve information on any
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The internet discovers TLA+. Now what?
A practical introduction to TLA+, why it matters for agentic coding, and how AI could take formal verification from models to machine-checked proofs and ultimately to verified software.
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Video CDs Break Windows Explorer
There is an odd bug in Windows related to Video CDs . To reproduce it: Insert a Video CD (if you don't have one, you can download this fi...
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What even is an OS now?
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
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Writing Efficient C++ Code (2013)
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Platform-independent SIMD in Go
Go 1.27 adds an experimental platform-agnostic SIMD API