2671
Year 2038 problem is still alive and well
Largely because of a single code snippet used by many.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
2672
Win32 is the stable Linux userland ABI (and the consequences)
This post was inspired by some controversy with Valve and their support for Linux, but the bulk of it comes from long-term observation. One of the biggest impacts with the viability of Linux on the desktop was Valve’s Proton, a… Continue reading →
2673
Make Linux look like Windows 95
Blasphemy? Probably! But still pretty awesome!
2674
Curious lack of sprintf scaling
Some days ago I noticed that on a Mac, doing snprintf calls from multiple threads shows curious lack of scaling ( see tweet ). Replacing snprintf with {fmt} library can speed up the OBJ exporter in Blender 3.2 by 3-4 times . This could have been the end of the story, filed under a “eh, sprintf is bad!” drawer, but I…
2675
How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2022
Between 2016 and 2020 I wrote a series of blog posts called “How to speed up the Rust compiler”. These were mostly about my work on the Rust compiler, plus some updates on the progress on the Rust compiler’s speed in general.
2676
Going multipath without Multipath TCP
Gigabit ethernet has been around for a long time, it’s so ubiquitous that there is a very strong chance that if you have a RJ-45 port on your computer, it’s going to be a gigabit ethernet network interface.
2677
The time has come to replace file systems
The time has come to replace file systems!
2678
2679
eBPF for tracing how Firefox uses page faults to load libraries
Modern browsers are some of the most complicated programs ever written. For example, the main Firefox library on my system is over 130Mbytes. Doing 130MB of IO poorly can be quite a performance hit, even with SSDs! :). Few people seem to understand how memory-mapped IO works. There are no pre-canned tools to observe…
2680
Avoiding the top Nginx configuration mistakes
Deliver modern applications with NGINX. Explore high-performance load balancing, API gateways, and web server solutions trusted by top global enterprises.
2681
Bytecode interpreters for tiny computers (2007)
I've previously come to the conclusion that there's little reason for using bytecode in the modern world, except in order to get more compact code, for which it can be very effective. So, what kind of a bytecode engine will give you more compact code?
2682
Frugal Computing (2021)
On the need for low-carbon and sustainable computing and the path towards zero-carbon computing.
2683
2684
How Does NTP (Network Time Protocol) Work?
The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a system for synchronizing the clocks of hosts and clients across the Internet. NTP is a protocol intended to synchronize all computers participating in the network to within a few milliseconds of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The core of the protocol is NTP’s clock discipline…
2685
Cardboard: a scrollable tiling window manager
After the initial learning curve, I found that Cardboard WM help me stay focused on one task and it greatly reduced how much time I spent rearranging my windows.
2686
Types of events in event-driven systems
Event-driven systems come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The obvious commonality is; they all use events to communicate information. These events come in many shapes and sizes, and determining what goes into an event has an immense impact on the design of your system.
2687
2688
Demodulation of the LTE uplink
I have been playing with some LTE recordings to brush up my knowledge, since it isn’t a protocol I’m very familiar with. I’m specially interested in understanding the structure and properties of all the pilot signals. Textbooks and documentation are great, but nothing beats getting your hands dirty with some IQ…
2689
LXC vs. Docker
Are you confused about whether to use LXC or Docker for your containerization needs? This article compares the two container platforms in terms of ...
2690
What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings (2011)
If you are dealing with text in a computer, you need to know about encodings. Period. Yes, even if you are just sending emails. Even if you are just receiving emails. You don't need to understand every last detail, but you must at least know what this whole "encoding" thing is about. And the good news first: while the…
2691
From macOS to FreeBSD
Personal experience with moving away from Apple's world.
2692
2693
Amazon Elastic File System Update – Sub-Millisecond Read Latency
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) was announced in early 2015 and became generally available in 2016. We launched EFS in order to make it easier for you to build applications that need shared access to file data. EFS is (and always has been) simple and serverless: you simply create a file system, attach it […]
2694
The Life of MS-DOS
First released on August 12, 1981, MS-DOS became the foundation for business computing for almost two decades. This article details different versions and releases that all stemmed from Gary Kildall's QDOS.
2695
The Kobayashi Maru of comparing dates with times
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
2696
Prefix Sum with SIMD
In other words, the $k$-th element of the output sequence is the sum of the first $k$ elements of the input sequence.
2697
Testing Distributed Systems
Curated list of resources on testing distributed systems
2698
A decade of major cache incidents at Twitter
This is a collection of information on severe ( SEV-0 or SEV-1 , the most severe incident classifications) incidents at Twitter that were at least partially attributed to cache from the time Twitter started using its current incident tracking JIRA (2012) to date (2022), with one bonus incident from before 2012. Not…
2699
2700
The world of PostgreSQL wire compatibility
A wire protocol is the format for interactions between a database server and its clients. It encompasses authentication, sending queries, receiving responses, and so on. It is a description of the exact bytes sent and received by servers and clients. It does NOT encompass the actual query language itself, let alone…