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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 533 posts.
Against Essential and Accidental Complexity
In the classic 1986 essay, No Silver Bullet , Fred Brooks argued that there is, in some sense, not that much that can be done to improve programmer productivity. His line of reasoning is that programming tasks contain a core of essential/conceptual 1 complexity that's fundamentally not amenable to attack by any…
Systems design explains the world: volume 1
"Systems design" is a branch of study that tries to find universal architectural patterns that are valid across disciplines. You might thin...
The Genius of RISC-V Microprocessors
How the instruction set for RISC-V processors has been designed cleverly for both simplicity and high performance.
Some Git internals
Here is my test file tree. There are two files and a "src" subdirectory, where another two files are stored:
Redox OS 0.6.0
The Redox official website
Jepsen: Scylla 4.2-rc3
Scylla is a distributed wide-column 1 database which originated as a C++ port of Cassandra, aiming for improved performance. It supports both Cassandra- and DynamoDB -compatible APIs, and is intended for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, including analytics, messaging, and other time-series data.
Tokio 1.0 – async runtime for Rust
Tokio is a runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. It provides async I/O, networking, scheduling, timers, and more.
Xfce 4.16
Today, after 1 year and 4 months of work, we are happy to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.16, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.14.
Booting an M1 Mac from an external disk
If you’ve been unable to create a bootable external disk to use with your M1 Mac, this explains what you need and its limitations and quirks.
Bare-Metal Kubernetes with K3s
Learn how to configure K3s on bare-metal to run a Kubernetes cluster with just as much resilience and fault tolerance as a managed service.
eBPF Is Awesome
A blog about programming, technology and open-source stuff.
An Introduction to Lock-Free Programming (2012)
Lock-free programming is a challenge, not just because of the complexity of the task itself, but because of how difficult it can be to penetrate the subject in the first place. I …
Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V
The M1 is the beginning of a paradigm shift, which will benefit RISC-V microprocessors, but not the way you think.
Windows 10 20H2: ChkDsk damages filesystem on SSDs with KB4592438 installed
[German]In Windows 10 20H2 with installed cumulative update KB4592438, chkdsk causes massive issues. It destroys the file system during a disk check on SSDs, so Windows 10 can’t start after a reboot.
Big Sur bug prevents upgrades to the next version
If you work with Apple in some capacity, you know that they’re not very likely to admit mistakes. I’m not aware of Apple publishing postmortems after outages or providing details about known issues. So it’s up to the developer and admin communities at large to help each other learn about outages and potential causes…
Apple has stopped providing standalone installers for macOS updates
Apple released macOS Big Sur 11.1 on 14 December. Although yesterday it finally posted standalone installers for the two concomitant security updates to Catalina and Mojave, no standalone updaters …
Stripe’s payments APIs: the first ten years
Abstracting away the complexity of payments has driven the evolution of our APIs over the last decade. Learn more about Stripe payments APIs here.
The Case of the Extra 40ms
By: John Blair, Netflix Partner Engineering
ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook: A SIMD Benchmark
In my previous blog post, I compared the performance of my new ARM-based MacBook Pro with my 2017 Intel-based MacBook Pro. I used a number parsing benchmark. In some cases, the ARM-based MacBook Pro was nearly twice as fast as the older Intel-based MacBook Pro. I think that the Apple M1 processor is a breakthrough ……
Why software ends up complex
Complexity in software, whether it’s a programming languages, an API, or a user interface, is generally regarded as a vice. And yet complexity is exceptionally common, even though no one ever sets out to build something complex. For people interested in building easy to use software, understanding the causes of…
Writing a Memory Allocator (2019)
Video lectureMutator, Allocator, CollectorMemory blockAllocator interfaceMemory alignmentMemory mappingFreeing the objectsBlocks reuseFirst-fit searchAssignmentsNext-fit searchBest-fit searchBlocks splittingBlocks coalescingExplicit Free-listSegregated-list searchOptimizing the storageCustom sbrkConclusion This is the…
Thread-Per-Core Buffer Management for a modern storage system
Redpanda powers an Agentic Data Plane and Data Streaming platform for real-time performance, AI innovation, and simplified operations.
ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
Up to yesterday, my laptop was a large 15-inch MacBook Pro. It contains an Intel Kaby Lake processor (3.8 GHz). I just got a brand-new 13-inch 2020 MacBook Pro with Apple's M1 ARM chip (3.2 GHz). How do they compare? I like precise data points. Recently, I have been busy benchmarking number parsing routines where you…
Introducing x64 emulation in preview for Windows 10 on ARM PCs to the Windows Insider Program
Updated 11/16/2021: x64 emulation for Windows is now generally available in Windows 11. For those interested in experiencing this, a PC running Windows 11 on Arm is required. Today, we're releasing the first preview of x64 emulation
A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM
Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 21277 (RS_PRERELEASE) to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel. As mentioned here, we are giving Windows Insiders in