The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
YJIT’s ability to improve performance by adapting to run-time behavior can increase the speed of our code in a way that dropping down to C can’t. As such, I think we should reconsider the common wisdom that “rewriting our Ruby in C” is the ideal path to performance optimization and take a serious look at “rewriting…
Discover how Amazon Search combines technology and culture to empower its builder teams, ensuring platform resilience through Chaos Engineering.
If you ever get a chance to look through the classic Amiga OS source-code still floating around some murky corners of the internet, it is a thing of beauty and astonishing capabilities. It’s an inspirational piece of computing history with unmatched capabilities for the time. Remember, this was all on a computer…
As mentioned on previous posts, I have spent the past few weeks dealing with a ZFS crash on my FreeNAS install. Because of that, not only was I forced to learn how to troubleshoot ZFS, but I also had to learn how to setup new volumes and come up with new backup strategies (between a few other things).
This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years, in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array. Like the best programming tricks, this one is the right tool for the job…
I wish I knew if my math was correct...
I encountered the idea as a student, when I first read The Art of Computer Programming . I’d been programming already for most of my childhood, and I was completely blown away by the idea, which was entirely new to me. In fact, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that in the whole of TAOCP that was the single…
Microsoft retrieved the Northern Isles underwater datacenter from the seafloor off Scotland's Orkney Islands. Project Natick is proving the concept of underwater datacenters is feasible as well as logistically, environmentally and economically practical.
This vulnerability allows a physically-present attacker to control the full disk encryption unlock process and gain complete access to decrypted content in some cases where a TPM, dracut and Clevis are used.
It is time to celebrate EC2-Classic, which defined early cloud computing, and which is finally retiring.
This post will show you how to use D to write a bare-metal “Hello world” program that targets the RISC-V QEMU simulator. In a future blog post ( now available ) we’ll build on this to target actual hardware: the VisionFive 2 SBC. See blog-code for the final code from this post. For a more complex example, see…
When a laptop crashed in an empty office, we knew it was time to overhaul our performance testing framework.
How to get ACID transactions between almost any data stores, with the Epoxy protocol.
Companies see huge server savings with Elixir.
How to design a lock-free data structure? A detective story for curious developers.
In the following series of blog posts I will document my attempts to write Linux modules using the Ada language. In part 1, I will demonstrate how to write in Ada and build a simple "hello world" Linux kernel module. Additionally, I will introduce a basic customized Ada runtime to support our "hello world" module…
Xe Iaso's personal website.
A retrospective on a NetBSD server set up in 2010 under tight deadlines, running almost untouched for over a decade on consumer-grade hardware-proof of the OS's remarkable stability.
(yet) tl;dr In a recent thread on Mastodon, it was revealed that Ubuntu 23.04 users can’t install the Steam deb package from the Ubuntu archive without jumping through some technical hoops. It turns out this was a mistake, a bug was filed, and future builds shouldn’t have this problem. It’s not immediately apparent…
Summary In recent years, cellular architectures have become increasingly popular for large online services as a way to increase redundancy and limit the blast radius of site failures. In pursuit of these goals, we have migrated the most critical user-facing services at Slack from a monolithic to a cell-based…
Xe Iaso's personal website.
A solution to the problem of the growing number of mount points and loopback devices in (Ubuntu) Linux.
Elixir is the thing I do most of my public writing and speaking about. It is my default programming language for the last 5-6 years. It suits my brain. Performs well for the kind of work I typically do. And using it I have experienced very few drawbacks. Rather than writing yet another post trying to widely summarize…
It has been five months since my last general update on the Rust compiler’s performance. Let’s see what has happened in that time.
A large amount of fantastic open source software originates from “scratching an itch”. Such was the case with Firecracker . In 2014, Amazon launched AWS Lambda as a “serverless” compute platform: Users can provide a function — say, ten lines of Python code — and Lambda provides all of the infrastructure between an…
Here is a Go function, if_max(). It finds the max value of an array of integers. Simple enough:
Windows XP I have a lot of fond memories of Windows XP and after feeling nostalgic, I was happy to find out that it’s relatively easy to take it for a spin on an ARM64 Mac using QEMU. I decided to install XP and an assortment of classic software one final time, taking screenshots of the whole process. This included…
A couple of weeks ago, I was in an internal meeting where our CTO (Adam Prout) was giving a talk to our summer interns. The talk was about the current state of database companies, and how different providers are competing on different facets of their products. As the talk was
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