2101
“Clean” code, horrible performance
Many programming "best practices" taught today are performance disasters waiting to happen.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
2102
Firecracker internals: Inside the technology powering AWS Lambda (2021)
You are most likely familiar with AWS Lambda and Fargate — Amazon's serverless computing engines. At its nature, serverless computing introduces quite a challenging task requiring both tight security and great performance. For exactly that matter Amazon came up with its microVM solution called Firecracker .
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Very Long-Term Backup (2008)
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
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Speedy transactions in multicore in-memory databases
This paper is from SOSP'13. The Polyjuice paper, which we studied last week, built on the Silo codebase and commit protocol, which led me ...
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Gossip Glomers: Fly.io Distributed Systems Challenges
Fly.io Distributed Systems Challenges
2109
Haiku package management
I’ve long since been a die-hard BeOS fan and have been running the open-source recreation Haiku for many years. I think it’s interesting to explore the “alternative OS” world and consider some great ideas that for whatever reason never caught on elsewhere. The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative…
2110
Computer Networking Introduction: Ethernet and IP – Heavily Illustrated (2021)
What is a LAN? What is a network segment? How are L1, L2, and L3 segments related? What does it take to send an IP packet from one host to another? What is the difference between LAN, VLAN, and VXLAN?
2111
It's TCP vs. RPC All over Again
We’ve written previously about the fact that the Internet seems to be missing a standard protocol for the request/response paradigm, with repeated attempts to force-fit TCP leading to inevitable mismatches. Sometimes we feel that we are the only people who think this way, with our networking
2112
Is it time to replace TCP in data centers?
One of my readers asked for my opinion about the provocative “It’s Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter” article by prof. John Ousterhout. I started reading it, found too many things that didn’t make sense, and decided to ignore it as another attempt of a proverbial physicist solving hard problems in someone else’s…
2113
In Praise of Alpine and APK
Since the change of year, I’ve been using Alpine Linux on my main computing device (a new desktop PC that I assembled in December). These are some notes on in, some niceties and caveats.
2114
Dusting off Dreamcast Linux
Yes, here at Old VCR we live in the past, when RISC Unix workstations still ruled the earth like large boxy tentaculous Cthulhus. Oh, sure, ...
2115
Queues should be empty
I’ve been writing a pubsub listener for work recently and had this silly “shower thought”: the ideal queue should be empty. Why? If the queue is not empty, it means that whatever job is consuming from the queue is not keeping up with messages coming into it. Ok, then if queues are supposed to be empty, then what are…
2116
Reducing Tailscale’s binary size on macOS
Tailscale v1.36 for macOS features a significantly reduced binary size (going from 92MB to 56MB). The effort started out with a chance observation about a surprisingly large executable, and ended up involving some creative approaches using dlopen.
2117
AMD ROCm: A Wasted Opportunity
This post will mainly focus on ROCm HIP wasted opportunities for adoption. I wrote an overview of ROCm earlier at https://threedots.ovh/blog/2021/11/what-is-amd-rocm/ . This post will specifically eschew talking about issues about the API renames in ROCm HIP – breaking source compatibility with CUDA quite needlessly.
2118
I replaced grub with systemd-boot
To be able to investigate and work on the the measured boot features I have switched from grub to systemd-boot (sd-boot).
2119
Postgres WAL Files and Sequence Numbers
Go inside the WAL file with this in-depth look at WAL file Log Sequence Number (LSN), WAL segment positions, WAL file names, and pg_switch_wal.
2120
Real-time Ubuntu is now generally available
Real-time Ubuntu brings end-to-end security and reliability to the time-bound workloads of modern enterprises. With support for real-time compute, Canonical furthers its commitment to providing a best-in-class experience for open-source software consumption. 14 February 2023, London: Canonical today announced the…
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Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
But they are victims of complex societal factors that are beyond their control
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GPU Video acceleration in the Windows Subsystem for Linux now available
Introduction In DirectX ❤ Linux - DirectX Developer Blog we wrote about DXCore & D3D12 support on WSLg and described OpenGL & OpenCL support by
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My Fear of Commitment to the First CPU Core
On this Valentine's Day Weekend I share the heartbreak that caused my fear of commitment to the 1st CPU Core of any socket (not just core 0).
2125
Async message-oriented systems vs. REST for inter-microservice communications
Why was Mats created, what is the point of using message-based async RPC.
2126
A Heisenbug lurking in async Python
Textual is a TUI framework for Python, inspired by modern web development.
2127
How to train large models on many GPUs? (2021)
[Updated on 2022-03-13: add expert choice routing.] [Updated on 2022-06-10]: Greg and I wrote a shorted and upgraded version of this post, published on OpenAI Blog: “Techniques for Training Large Neural Networks”
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Gentoo Linux 2022 Retrospective
News and information from Gentoo Linux
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Manticore 6.0.0 – a faster alternative to Elasticsearch in C++
Today, the Manticore team is thrilled to announce the release of Manticore Search 6.