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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 148 posts.
The Treacherous Optimization
"I'm going to beat grep by thirty percent!" I confidently crow to anyone who would listen, those foolish enough to enter my office. And my girlfriend too, who's contractually obligated to pay attention to everything I say.
This is the mail system
This is how we tell hundreds of millions of computer users that something has gone wrong:
How a computer boots up
The previous post described [motherboards and the memory map] memory-map in Intel computers to set the scene for the initial phases of boot. Booting is an involved, hacky, multi-stage affair - fun st
The byte order fallacy
Whenever I see code that asks what the native byte order is, it's almost certain the code is either wrong or misguided. And if the native b...
Postgres 9.2 will feature linear read scalability up to 64 cores
Remember when I blogged about linear read scalability out to 32 cores ? Well, the awesome Nate Boley provided me with access to his brand n...
Don’t Eat Too Much Three Bean Salad. The Server Will Crash.
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Linux 3.3: Finally a little good news for bufferbloat
While I was out chasing computer history last week, the Linux 3.3 kernel was released. And a very interesting release it is, though not for its vaunted re-inclusion of certain Android kernel hacks. I think that modest move is being overblown in the press. No, Linux 3.3 appears to be the first OS to really
Consistent Hashing
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Java Tuning in a nutshell
While delivering a training recently, I got a request to put together a JVM tuning cheat sheet. Given the 50+ parameters available on the ...
Virtual Machines in Your Browser
Updated March 13, 2012 at 10:43PM: I have a list of limitations and known bugs toward the end. Updated March 14, 2012 at 9:30PM: I’ll be on the VMware Community Roundtable podcast at 12:00PM …
Array
There, that's known as a teaser. You see it in television all the time. "Find out which common household plant devours pets at night... but first ." And then you have to sit through and watch the stuff about Brad and Angelina shacking up / Shaq driving his new Hummer / Hummer's new fragrance before they get to the…
How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data
We use MySQL for storing all of the data in FriendFeed . Our database has grown a lot as our user base has grown. We now store over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.
How Mailinator compresses its email stream by 90%
Given the title of this article, the first thing that should pop into your mind is probably - "well, use a compression algorithm - right?". ...
How key-based cache expiration works
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things — Phil Karlton Doing cache invalidation by hand is an incredibly frustrating and error-prone process. You’re very likely to forget a spot and let stale data get served. That’s enough to turn…
How Basecamp Next got to be so damn fast without using much client-side UI
When we started working on Basecamp Next last year, we had much internal debate about whether we should evolve the existing code base or rewrite it. I’ll dive more into that debate further in a later post, but one of the key arguments for a rewrite was that we wanted a dramatic leap forward i…