181
PGSimCity - How PostgreSQL Works
An independent, non-commercial educational visualization of PostgreSQL internals. Not affiliated with Electronic Arts.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 518 posts.
182
Watching Go's new garbage collector move through the heap
Go 1.26 made Green Tea the default GC. We observe its cache-friendliness with perf, visualize the heap to see how Go allocates, and poke at a sparse-page problem a non-moving collector like Go's struggles with.
183
Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY actually scales
How we optimized Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY-backed data streams to 60K writes per second on a single Postgres server, with millisecond-scale latency.
184
SIMD for Collision
In a previous post SIMD Matters I discussed the big wins I got from graph coloring to make the contact solver faster. That same approach exists in Box3D. I like to call this approach “wide SIMD”. The idea is to process multiple work units at the same time. In the contact solver this means solving four contact points…
185
Everyone should know SIMD
SIMD has a reputation for being complex. I've met many very good software engineers who dismiss it as something too complex to learn or a niche optimization meant for only the highest-performance software, not useful in everyday programming.
186
Running Doom on Our Custom CPU and Going Viral
I get kidnapped by the MIG while adding DDR3 to our CPU
187
Designing an Ethernet Switch ASIC
Designing the world's first open source Ethernet switch ASIC. An unmanaged cut-through 3-port 100Mbps switch fabbed on Global Foundries 180 nm.
188
GC and Exceptions in Wasmtime
The Wasm GC and exceptions proposals are both enabled by default in today’sWasmtime 47 release! We are excited to help bring more languages to WebAssemblyand everywhere that Wasmtime runs. Getting to this point involved large Wasmtimecha...
189
ECC and DDR5
Hamming Codes ECC RAM corrects errors that occur in memory before it gets to the CPU. The most common form of ECC is the Hamming Code [1] which when it has R redundant bits can correct single bit e…
190
Frame – Linux X server in Assembly
Philosophy - Sciences - Geekery - Art - Life - Coaching - Fun < Simplify Everything
191
Making 768 servers look like 1
How to make 768 distinct Postgres servers look like 1 to your applications.
192
Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU
A storage appliance that shipped before AVX2 existed now runs Google's Gemma 4 26B in my basement, no GPU. Here's how we got a modern MoE model onto a CPU older than the instructions its inference engine assumed were there.
193
Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
I built a device to measure end-to-end input latency, then used it to find out what actually moves the needle.
194
The Zen of Parallel Programming
As I continue reading An Introduction to Parallel Programming, I cannot help but notice a connection between communication among processors, communication among human beings, and communication within the individual self....
195
Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
KO | EN | Discussions on HN I still have a netbook I bought back in 2009. The ASUS Eee PC 1000HE has an Intel Atom N280 and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. The Atom N series was Intel’s line of cheap, low-performance CPUs for netbooks. The chip has 56KB of L1 cache and 512KB of L2 cache, and its clock speed is 1.6...
196
Job queues are deceptively tricky
A worked out example of different job queueing semantics and how they affect workloads.
197
Linux on the Sega 32X. Who needs hardware synchronization primitives anyway?
How wanting more is not always better
198
Benchmarking 15 “E-Waste” GPUs with Modern Workloads
Decommissioned enterprise tesla GPUs are widely available and extremely cheap. In this post, I benchmark tesla GPUs to see if they are useful
199
Quadrupling code performance with a "useless" if
So I was optimizing a domain-specific compressor the other day, as one does. One important problem was chunking the input string and optimally choosing the most compact encoding for each chunk (different encodings compress different characters better, so where to split is not immediately obvious). The previous post…
200
Your code is fast if you're lucky
Recently, while working on an optimized Quicksort implementation, I came across a rather interesting quirk. Modern compilers (especially Clang) optimize loops using fast, branch-free instructions - provided you use the right programming style.
201
Remote Attestation
If it quacks like a duck...
202
GhostLock, a stack-UAF that has existed in all Linux distributions for 15 years
GhostLock (CVE-2026-43499) is a Linux kernel vulnerability found by Nebu that exists in every major distribution since 2011. Triggering the bug does not require any special kernel config or privilege. By turning it into a 97% stable privilege escalation and container escape, Google has rewarded us $92,337 in…
203
Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus
Cloudflare Research is building a global consensus service called Meerkat that uses a new consensus algorithm called QuePaxa. We plan to use Meerkat to build a strongly consistent, fault-tolerant key-value store, and other applications.
204
How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
If you need a basic NAS and don't care about GUI features, it is suprisingly simple to set up a ZFS dataset and share it over the network using Samba.
205
Why we built yet another Postgres connection pooler
PgDog is a connection pooler, load balancer, and sharding proxy for PostgreSQL. Scale Postgres horizontally without rewriting your application.
206
Inference Optimization for MiMo v2.5: Pushing Hybrid SWA Efficiency to the Limit
An end-to-end engineering practice for the MiMo-V2.5 series inference system, covering KVCache management, tiered caching, SWA-aware prefix cache trees, scheduling, Prefill/Decode pipelines, and multimodal optimizations.
207
Girls just wanna have fast MPMC queues with bounded waiting
Disclaimer: An earlier version of this post claimed the structure is wait-free, this is incorrect. Being wait-free requires that failure or suspension of any thread can’t cause failure or suspension of another thread. This queue in fact does not fulfill that requirement. The main section which discusses the wait…
208
Linux on the Atari Jaguar
The challenges around porting Linux to an old videogame console by Atari
209
Ditching Vagrant: VMs with KVM and Virsh on Debian
Goodbye, old friend. We’ve been traveling together since 2010, and you’ve faithfully served all my virtual machine needs well, first with VirtualBox and then later with libvirt and KVM . But, as they 1 say, all good things must pass.
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Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork
Published: 05-07-2026 20:33 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article