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Humiliating IIS servers for fun and jail time
cybersecurity, tech, and personal annoyance log
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 518 posts.
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Making ast.walk 220x Faster
Why ast.walk when you can ast.sprint? How we made Python AST traversal 220x faster while building a custom linter for Reflex's AI code generation.
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DuckDB Internals Part 1
Walk through DuckDB's internals: how it skips serialization overhead, parses and optimizes SQL, and stores data in columnar row groups with zone maps.
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The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation
Offensive content in the eyes of a software engineer.
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How TimescaleDB compresses time-series data
TimescaleDB compression with hypercore - columnar storage with up to 98% ratio in PostgreSQL. segmentby/orderby configuration and a benchmark for IoT and time-series.
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To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
The new "Fractal" operating system kernel, developed at MIT, gives researchers a clearer look at how computer chips work internally. It was used to study the branch predictors inside Apple's M1 processor, where it revealed a potential vulnerability to major speculative attacks.
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Boot Naked Linux
When I was a kid , computers weren’t coddled and left running 24/7, when you were done with them you switched them off, and when you wanted them again you just switched them on and within a second or so they’d be loading whatever was in their disk drive.
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21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)
Eight long held and common beliefs about the network have been shown, time after time, to be false. What are they, and what do they mean?
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Caddy compatibility for zeroserve: 3x throughput and 70% lower latency
zeroserve is a high-performance HTTPS server that runs eBPF scripts in userspace ( intro ). Now it's got a Caddy-compat mode - when provided a Caddyfile, zeroserve JIT-compiles it to eBPF and then to native x86_64/ARM64 machine code, and runs it in an io_uring event loop.
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Running DOS on Behringers DDX3216 with a DIY x86-Bios from Scratch
In 1994 I got my first computer: an Intel i486 DX2-66 with 4 MB RAM and a 512MB harddisk. The software was IBMs OS/2 and Microsofts Windows 3.11. In the next four years I was upgrading this machine every few months with more RAM (up to 16MB), a CD-ROM-drive and a soundblaster card. So I learned upgrading this machine…
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Looking Forward to Postgres 19: It's About Time
Postgres 19 brings native temporal table support. Shaun Thomas covers WITHOUT OVERLAPS, FOR PORTION OF, and temporal foreign keys - and what's still missing.
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Introduction to UEFI HTTP(s) Boot with QEMU/OVMF
The historic go-to solution for network booting is PXE. PXE is based on DHCP and TFTP. It is tricky to correctly configure, even trickier to make it highly available and good luck with the security with this clear-text unsigned protocol.
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WASI 0.3
WASI 0.3 is official, and async is now native to WebAssembly Components. The WASI Subgroup voted to ratify WASI 0.3.0, rebasing WASI onto the WebAssembly Component Model’s async primitives. The 0.3.0 specification is now stable, and runt...
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Spoiling Linux Kernel with "sanctioned" code
Last year I've fixed a bug in Linux kernel OHCI (USB 1.1) stack , which rendered my old printer unreliable: OHCI adds artificial delay of 1ms for each USB transfer of send-read pattern, while my very old, host-based printer expects very tight timings and constant latency, like some kind of CnC machine.
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Linux latency measurements and compositor tuning
Linux latency on the desktop and in games compared to Windows. Network streaming with Sunshine and Moonlight. Tuning the KWin compositor for lower latencies.
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Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
An introduction to my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad addiction Over 10 years ago I got my first ThinkPad x60. I got interested in free software by reading the about GNU …
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Full Reverse Engineering of the TI-84 Plus Operating System
Evidence-indexed documentation of TI-84 Plus OS 2.55MP ROM behavior and hardware interfaces.
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The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0
WASI P3 is almost here, bringing native async support to the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) and Component Model. In this post, we’re looking to the next big milestone: a stable, formally specified Component Model 1.0.At February’s B...
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How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
breakdown of the architecture behind Linear's speed: local-first sync, MobX observables, instant first loads, and a keyboard-first design.
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More Molly Guards
A blog about software craft and quality
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Zeroserve: A zero-config web server you can script with eBPF
zeroserve is a small, fast, zero-config HTTPS server. You hand it a tarball of a website and it serves it - over HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, with hot reload and a tiny resident footprint. The twist is that you can drop eBPF programs into the tarball and they run on every request, in userspace, as sandboxed middleware …
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Running Python code in a sandbox with MicroPython and WASM
I’ve been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics …
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Looking Forward to Postgres 19: Query Hints
Postgres 19 brings plan advice: the query hints the Postgres community held off on for 15 years. Shaun Thomas covers the 15-year debate, pg_plan_advice, pg_stash_advice, and how to use them.
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Win16 Memory Management
This is a kind of knowledge base article which resulted from attempts to understand exactly how memory management works in 16-bit Windows. It is not exactly undocumented, but it is also not well documented; even before Windows 3.0 appeared, the assumption was that essentially all application developers were going to…
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Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux
Microsoft’s in-house Linux, the distribution that grew out of CBL-Mariner, just hit public preview as a general-purpose cloud OS you can run on any Azure VM and coming soon to WSL.
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WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access
From DrvFs in WSL 1 to Plan 9 to virtiofs, cross-OS file access in WSL 2 has improved with each generation. A new change gives each virtio device its own dedicated DMA pool, removing the last major contention point on the virtiofs path.
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Every Byte Matters
I have spent a large portion of my career working in Java. In that time, you get used to huge classes. New functionality? Just add a new method and field to the class. The cost of each new field is rarely considered. Performance is often considered from a classic computer science perspective by considering asymptotic…
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Roku LT Operating System open source distribution
Roku provides the simplest way to stream entertainment to your TV. On your terms. With thousands of available channels to choose from.