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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 553 posts.

Systems & Performance
2021
121

How to Safely Think in Systems

While there are a decent number of folks out there modeling systems, there’s a much larger group of folks who think of themselves as systems thinkers but utilize techniques like modeling rather casually (a polite way of saying that they don’t use them). Even with modeling tools available, I’ve often taken the shortcut…

127

FreeBSD Audio

I started using FreeBSD in 2016 as a dual-boot with Linux. The reason was that at the time Linux provided no support for real-time threads and preemptive scheduling but did provide a wider choice of audio applications. Today, as the FreeBSD audio ecosystem improved a lot, I am a happy single-OS user. You may ask…

134

When can glibc be built with Clang?

Updated in 2026: glibc 2.43 added experimental support for building with Clang. In September 2021, I wrote "So, dear glibc, will you be happy with my sending Clang patches?" in Build glibc with LLD 13. We have come to a turning point. In Linux Plumbers Conference 2021, at the glibc Birds of a Feather session, I asked…

139

SerenityOS: Year 3 in Review

SerenityOS is a from-scratch desktop operating system that combines a Unix-like core with the look&feel of 1990s productivity software. It's written in modern C++ and goes all the way from kernel to web browser. The project aims to build everything in-house instead of relying on third-party libraries.

145

Plan 9 Desktop Guide

Briefly, Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a computer operating system developed by the original UNIX design team. After decades of work on Research UNIX in the late 80's, the team decided to write a new operating system from scratch, Plan 9 was finally released in 1992, and a few years later they released yet another…