The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 516 posts.
malloc has a very nice and simple interface: you ask for a certain amount of memory, and you’re given a void pointer to your block of contiguous bytes that’s been magicked into existence. Once you’re done with it, you call free with the same pointer and the memory disappears into the ether.
I’ve been a self-employed contractor for about a decade now, and I’m bummed about Harvest .
For Claude to learn from experience, it has to decide what’s worth remembering before it knows what’s next. Here’s how “dreaming” helps it organize memory and correct mistakes.
libghostty-vt 1.0 is here. libghostty is a portable, high-performance C library for terminal emulation, extracted directly from the core of Ghostty. The 1.0 release means both the library itself and the C ABI are now stable.
Firecracker is supposed to keep untrusted code inside a microVM. We escaped it and achieved code execution as root on the host.
GitHub's new Git storage architecture is built so thousands of agents can push to a single repository at once. Here's how it works.
A series of articles about bare-metal programming for x86 PC-type computers, using Linux for development.
Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output until the buffer…
Sorry for the clickbait title. I promise this post delivers: 44100 Hz stereo with near-Opus bitrates using about 4% of the N64’s CPU time.
kitty is a feature-rich, cross-platform, fast, GPU based terminal. To update kitty, follow the instructions. Recent major new features: Docked windows [0.50]: kitty windows can now be docked to an ...
Prompted by another project idea that popped into my mind, I did some Unix archaeology and looked at the original sources . This is the most fun I've ever had reading someone else's code - probably due to the historical significance. But also because of how delightfully approachable it was, compared to modern…
macOS 15 Sequoia had a hard time with CoreStorage – and thus encrypted HFS+ volumes – since it deprecated both technologies and callously crippled some important tools for working with them, but nonetheless it mostly still worked. While I’d often – but not always – have to manually unlock one of my HFS+ volumes – but…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
An optimization that made Pivot significantly faster on GROUP BY queries with a Top-K operator above them, and a walkthrough of how analytical databases run GROUP BY in the first place.
No patched kernels are available yet for 22.04, 24.04, or 26.04 despite a CVSS 9.8 rating.
In case you missed it: CVE-2026-98432 is a critical (CVSS 9.8) bug in the Linux kernel's TCP code. It's been there since 2016, so virtually every Linux server on the planet has it, and it can be hit remotely. Anthropic says it built a working exploit that gets root on a server. A total takeover.
Zone setting changes used to rebuild entire DNS zones, even ones with tens of millions of records. Here is how we built a planner that picks the smallest safe build, cutting full builds by 40%, peak memory by 85%, and halving build delay.
CVE-2026-98432 is a CVSS 9.8 remote use-after-free in Linux's IPv4 TCP handshake, fixed upstream Oct 15. RHEL has fixes; Ubuntu's are still in testing.
When your database CPU is at 100%, what is it actually doing? Memory stalls, CPU caches, and how radix partitioning makes GROUP BY faster.
Modern applications often spread state across a variety of systems: databases, caches, queues, data warehouses, search indices, and so on. Coordinating these systems is challenging: caches are often stale, the analytics platform might lag days behind the primary database, the search index might lose data, and…
We have seen in a previous post that switch statements are more complex than they seem. The compiler is able to implement them as a decision tree (even though maybe it shouldn't). Is that everything it can do?
I am talking about the I/O operations as used in computing here. A typical example of how this kind of thing is exposed are the POSIX syscalls read(2) and write(2), which have the following C funct…
A blog post about finding the oldest Windows application with a GUI that still runs on Windows 11
By now regular readers of this blog are quite familiar with my affection for the 1996 Apple Network Server , Apple's Unix-through-and-thro...
How bbtree, a drop-in replacement for std's BTreeMap, cuts cache misses, instructions and cache coherence traffic, and how it is kept correct.
In September 2014 I published a short post announcing rqlite. The idea was simple: take SQLite, put a Raft log in front of it, and replicate every write to a cluster so that the loss of a node did not mean the loss of the data. The source went on GitHub that same weekend. As…
Do you feel spoiled by modern hardware? I know I do. Even the cheapest CPUs have at least 4 cores nowadays, running billions of operations per second. The idea that you could run any software on le…
A real VLC video filter, ported line by line to C# and raced against the original C inside VLC 4, then optimized on both sides, with byte-identical output throughout.
Arch Linux ARM on the ASUS ProArt P16, with a bootable installer, published Windows comparisons, and local Qwen inference.
