The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,950 posts.
Even though MP3 is probably the single most well known file format and codec on Earth, it’s not very well understood by most programmers – for many encoders/decoders is in the class of software “other people” write, like standard libraries or operating system kernels. This article will attempt to demystify the…
We know what Unix's future used to look like. It was designed by the research group at Bell Labs that built Unix and called ‘Plan 9 from Bell Labs’. [ 154 ] Plan 9 was an attempt to do Unix over again, better.
A flaw exists in the debugging code in sudo versions 1.8.0 through 1.8.3p1 that can be used to crash sudo or potentially allow an unauthorized user to elevate privileges. Sudo versions affected: 1.8.0 through 1.8.3p1 inclusive. Older versions of sudo are not affected. CVE ID: This vulnerability has been assigned…
In the research field of compression, the usual goal is to achieve the best possible compression rate. The best known algorithms, however, are very slow, and sometimes impractical for real-world ap…
From the very start, we wanted Basecamp Next to be fast. Really, really fast. To do so we built a russian-doll architecture of nested caching that I’ll write up in detail soon. But for now I just wanted to share where all this caching is going to live as we just installed it at the hosting ce…
Three years ago, I wrote about how improvements in technology keep allowing us to punt on sharding the Basecamp database. This is still true, only more so now. We’ve grown enormously over the last three years but RAM keeps getting cheaper and FusionIO SSD’s keep getting faster. If an…
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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Or, A Heterogeneous Supercomputer in Every Pocket In the twilight of Moore’s Law, the transitions to multicore processors, GPU computing, and HaaS cloud computing are not separate trends, bu…
Introducing Mempodipper , an exploit for CVE-2012-0056. /proc/ pid /mem is an interface for reading and writing, directly, process memory by seeking around with the same addresses as the process's virtual memory space. In 2.6.39, the protections against unauthorized access to /proc/ pid /mem were deemed sufficient…
I tried building FreeBSD AMIs for the 32-bit EC2 instance types the same way as I did the 64-bit instances — by defenestrating Windows AMIs — but there was a catch: They wouldn't boot. In fact, when I tried this six months ago, they not only didn't boot, but they didn't even produce any console output to help me…
David Ungar is "an out-of-the-box thinker who enjoys the challenge of building computer software systems that work like magic and fit a user...
Here is an update about the previous blog post about the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). In 5 months, the point of view changed quite a bit...
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the stable/9 branch, which improves on stable/8 and adds many new features. Some of the highlights:
Introduction This is the first part of a series of blog posts I intend to write, whose aim will be to explain how garbage collection works in the real world (in particular, with the JVM). I will co…
Varnish is a powerful, flexible HTTP accelerator that speeds up web applications by caching content and optimizing delivery.
There's just one small problem: The way POSIX has defined close(2) is completely and utterly broken.
Ever since MacOS 10.0 was released, text fields have supported Emacs bindings for the single-character Control commands, showing that there were people inside Apple (and, presumably, NeXT) who were right-thinking and sensible. But some time late in the 10.6 release cycle, and continuing into 10.7.1, the binding for…
The source code of Doom3 has been released three days ago :) ! I have started to read it and I will probably write a code review if enough people are interested. According to the README.txt the source code is building well with Visual Studio 2010 but it is not building at all on Mac OS X with XCode 4.0 ( it is…
