The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
Today, we would like to present a lesser-known feature of the Linux kernel. Instead of launching a program from a file system, regardless of whether it's virtual or not, it is also possible to embed a user-space program directly into the kernel image itself and start it from there.
Hubris's oddest syscall
How we cut build times by 50% and shipped a solution for scale.
By Ruben Schade in Eora/Sydney, Australia.
Amazon MemoryDB for Redis is a database service designed for 11 9s of durability with in-memory performance. In this paper, we describe the architecture of MemoryDB and how we leverage open-source Redis, a popular data structure store, to build an enterprise-grade cloud database. MemoryDB offloads…
Ruby’s garbage collector is designed to be adaptable, scaling from short Ruby scripts to running apps that serve millions of requests per second. While it’s designed to be adaptable, it may not work optimally for every use case. For this reason, Ruby’s garbage collector supports many parameters that can be used to…
1500 bytes is a bit out there as numbers go, or at least it seems that way if you touch computers for a living. It’s not a power of two or anywhere close, it’s suspiciously base-ten-round, and computers don’t care all that much about base ten, so how did we get here?
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
I’ve been on the lookout for a ethernet switch that I don’t hate, the problem with a lot of higher speed (10G and above) ethernet switches is that they are quite expensive new and if you buy the used then they rarely have many years left ( or none at all ) of software patches.
If you're writing C++, there's a good reason (maybe...) as to why you are. And probably, that reason is performance. So often when reading about the language you'll find all sorts of " performance tips and tricks " or " do this instead because it's more efficient ". Sometimes you get a good explanation as to why you…
Fifty years ago, PC software pioneer Gary Kildall demonstrated CP/M, the first commercially successful personal computer operating system.
Cliff L. Biffle blogged a great write-up of a debugging odyssey at Oxide with the title Who killed the network switch? Here’s the bit that jumped out at me: At the time that code was written…
Narrow waists: an idea in software architecture that relates to networking, operating systems, language design, compilers, and distributed systems.
Paul Hsieh's 6th generation x86 CPU comparision page including K6, P-II and 6x86MX geared towards the high performance software developer audience
A thought experiment on the winners, losers and new players in a cloud-driven stock, fx and commodity-trading world
Project community server: https://discord.gg/side7 On September 20th, 2022, the live-service first-person hero shooter "GUNDAM EVOLUTION" was launched. A little over a year later, on November 29th, 2023, it abruptly reached its end of life. As a passionate enthusiast of hero shooters and the Gundam franchise, the…
This is definitely not a "learn distributed systems in 21 days" post. I recommend a principled, from the foundations-up, studying of distrib...
A few years ago, I have blogged about my approach to sandboxing less-trusted applications that I have to or want to run on my main machine. The approach has changed since then, so it is tim...
I have recently released an open source tool called sotrace . It maps out the .so dependencies for a binary or library, and presents th...
Why an Intel Mac’s up to 40 Gb/s from Thunderbolt 3 is less than an Apple silicon Mac’s up to 40 Gb/s from USB4, and how you can benefit from it.
With the recent release of OpenBSD 7.5, I decided to run through my personal OpenBSD “installer” for laptop/desktop devices. The project is built off of the dwm tiling window manager and only installs a few basic packages. The last time I updated it was with the release of 7.3, so it’s been due for an minor rework.
On my journey to learn CUDA, I decided to tackle the One Billion Row Challenge with it.
PowerPC Macs were produced in huge numbers, and a lot of this hardware is still viable for use today, with professional software such as Photoshop CS2 and Propellerheads Reason. They're still good workstations, with lots of productivity software, and no always-online tracking or distractions. Originally, I got mine…
From the Zed Blog: In this episode of Zed Decoded, Thorsten and Antonio explore how we use async Rust in the Zed code base to ensure perfect cooperation with macOS to always maintain responsiveness and high-performance.
I recently implemented a small program to visualize the inner workings of a scheme that compresses floating point timeseries by XORing subsequent values. The resulting visualizations are quite neat…
Those of you who haven’t been in IT for far, far too long might not know that next month will be the 16th(!) anniversary of the disclosure of what was, at the time, a fairly earth-shattering revelation: that for about 18 months, the Debian OpenSSL package was generating entirely predictable private keys .
SQLite is fast, really fast. On a single ~40€ / m commodity server, it can sustain ~168,000 reads and ~8000 writes per second, concurrently. Because it's an embedded library designed for client-side applications such as embedded systems and phone & desktop applications, SQLite databases have to be co-located…
