The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 533 posts.
This post is the first in a three-part series about my recent work on Cranelift as part of my day job at Mozilla. In this first post, I will set some context and describe the instruction selection problem. In particular, I'll talk about a revamp to the instruction selector and backend framework in general that we've…
The much anticipated NVIDIA GeForce RTX3080 has been released. How good is it with TensorFlow for machine learning? How about molecular dynamics with NAMD? I've got some preliminary numbers for you!
It’s been 18 months since we talked about our Rails modular monolith. We lay out the current state of the work, and things we’d do differently if we started again.
It's been one year since we moved GitLab.com to Kubernetes. We unpack the challenges and learnings from this major migration.
Concurrent operations can be grouped relatively neatly into categories based on their cost
How is Google so fast? It’s so fast we take it for granted. It feels instant from the time you search to when results are displayed. What can we learn abou...
First, I want to make it clear that I’m not accusing the compositor of true evil, which I define roughly as deliberately causing suffering. There’s unfortunately too much of that in the world. I mean it in the more metaphorical sense that it causes serious problems and forces other parts of the system to be more…
Before ‘cyber’ was a prefix for everything internet and computers, it was how mathematicians were going to conquer the world.
As AI and HPC datasets continue to increase in size, the time spent loading data for a given application begins to place a strain on the total application’s performance. When considering end-to-end…
An accessible overview of how exactly a router works, with code examples.
As consumer devices and internet speeds become faster, websites become larger and more complex. Is website performance getting worse overall?
Operating systems and file systems have traditionally been developed hand in hand. They impose mutual constraints on each other. Today we have two major leaders in file system semantics: Windows and POSIX . They are very close to each other when compared to the full set of possibilities. Interesting things happened…
PostgreSQL 13 development is coming along nicely, Postgres 13 Beta3 was released on 8/13/2020 . The Postgres Beta 1 and 2 releases were released in May and June 2020. One of the features that has my interest in Postgres 13 is the B-Tree deduplication effort. B-Tree indexes are the default indexing method in Postgres…
Take manual control of your Linux system’s DNS resolution and keep programs from interfering with and overwriting your resolv.conf file.
I'm taking a break from debugging books to talk about a calamitous shitshow of textbook writing: Mastering C Pointers: Tools for Programming Power , by Robert J. Traister.
These views generally result in my being labeled a Luddite by the Unix priesthood. But Ned Ludd was right --- the new machines did not make conditions better for ordinary working folk: the people whose conditions were immediately improved were those who owned the machinery, and whose profits thereby increased…
The heap is a data structure that I use all the time and that others somehow use rarely. (I once had a coworker tell me that he knew some code was mine because it used a heap) Recently I was writin…
At Buffer, we’ve been using Kubernetes since 2016. We’ve been managing our k8s (kubernetes) cluster with kops, it has about 60 nodes (on AWS), and runs about 1500 containers. Our transition to a micro-service architecture has been full of trial and errors. Even after a few years running k8s, we are still learning its…
Unix Wars
Facts, directions, and thoughts regarding the evolution of OpenBSD framebuffer consoles
Provision of maintenance procedures and tools is at the heart of software engineering, but not in macOS.
