New

The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,950 posts.

Systems & Performance
Any year
6825

You can’t beat a good compiler…. right?

It is extremely well worn conventional wisdom that for your “average” programmer, it’s pretty much impossible to beat a good optimizing compiler at writing fast code. For those who skip the “understanding” part, and jump straight into the “application” part, this rule of thumb tends to be grossly misunderstood, and…

6831

NoSQL vs. RDBMS: Let the flames begin

I’ve been getting solidly flamed recently, as have my former coworkers at Digg, my friends at Twitter, etc. about our adoption and promotion of various NoSQL storage systems. It seems that some DBAs are very, very upset that us internet kids are considering abandoning SQL’s ship. I’m not here to throw out a bunch of…

6833

Unix recovery legend

It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday, 1st October, 15:15 BST, to be precise, when Peter, an office-mate of mine, leaned away from his terminal and said to me, " Mario, I'm having a little trouble sending mail. " Knowing that msg was capable of confusing even the most capable of people, I sauntered over to his…