Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,560 posts.
Optimizing ClickHouse for Intel's ultra-high core count processors
Intel's latest processor generations are pushing the number of cores in a server to unprecedented levels. For analytical databases like ClickHouse, ultra-high core counts represent a huge opportunity and a complex challenge.
Timeliness without datagrams using QUIC
Media over QUIC: Rethink your approach. *Unless you're doing something dope.
Performance Improvements in .NET 7
.NET 7 is fast. Really fast. This post deep-dives into hundreds of performance improvements that contributed to that reality.
A sharded DuckDB on 63 nodes runs 1T row aggregation challenge in 5 sec
What happens when you give a distributed SQL engine a trillion-row dataset? GizmoEdge crushed the Coiled challenge with a 1,000-worker cluster on Azure.
UA 1093
On Thursday, 16 October, Foreign Object Debris (FOD) struck the windshield of UA1093, a 737 MAX aircraft, at approximately 36,000 ft. WindBorne began investigating…
Jepsen: Bufstream 0.1
2024-11-13 : An earlier version of this report asserted that consumers with auto-commit enabled could lose data by automatically committing offsets returned by the most recent poll. This claim was based in part on Confluent’s documentation , which states:
Syscall Auditing at Scale
If you are are an engineer whose organization uses Linux in production, I have two quick questions for you: 1) How many unique outbound TCP connections have your servers made in the past hour? 2) Which processes and users initiated each of those connections? If you can answer both of these questions, fantastic! You…
Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL
This post investigates how we got from Wi-Fi Direct to AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware, what makes Wi-Fi Aware technically superior, and why this shift unlocks true cross-platform peer-to-peer connectivity for developers.
Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout
The final report of the Expert Panel on the 28 April 2025 blackout in continental Spain and Portugal identifies the causes of the blackout and outlines recommendations to strengthen the resilience of Europe’s interconnected electricity system. It was prepared by a technical Expert Panel of 49 members, including…
Exploitable vulnerabilities found in Kaspersky Anti-Virus
Posted by the notorious Tavis Ormandy.We’ve talked before about how we use Google scale to ...
Hardening the Kernel in Android Oreo
News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.
Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster
DuckDB 2.0 alpha vs 1.5.5 on one laptop: recursive CTEs up to 90x, VARIANT 6x faster than JSON text, async I/O 2.4x on S3. What changes, and how to model data to get the speedup. | Reading time: 15 min read
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.
Rust in the Linux Kernel: Just the Beginning
Support for using Rust in the Linux Kernel was recently merged by Linus Torvalds. This is important because Rust is memory safe, meaning that code written in Rust does not suffer from things like buffer overflows, use-after-free, and other memory management vulnerabilities that plague software written in unsafe…
FreeBSD 11.1 released
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE. This is the second release of the stable/11 branch.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will enable frame pointers by default
Today Canonical is raising the bar for performance and observability by enabling frame pointers by default in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. […]
Rust SIMD on the GPU
At VectorWare , we are building the first GPU-native software company . Today, we are excited to announce that we can successfully use Rust's portable SIMD ( core::simd ) on the GPU. This milestone marks a significant step towards our vision of enabling developers to write complex, high-performance applications that…
Why is there a “V” in SIGSEGV Segmentation Fault?
My program received a SIGSEGV signal and crashed with "Segmentation Fault" message. Where does the "V" come from? Did I read it wrong? Was there a "Segmentation *V*ault?"? Or did Linux authors make a mistake? Shouldn't the signal be named SIGSEGF?
Building a more power-efficient browser
Today, Jason Weber shared a post on the Windows Experience Blog demonstrating the power efficiency of Microsoft Edge over other popular browsers on Windows 10. With the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, we are hard at work pushing the envelope further, engineering Microsoft Edge to last even longer with typical…
The Mysterious 50 Ohm Impedance: Where It Came from and Why We Use It (2021)
50 Ohm impedance became the standard impedance used in RF transmission lines long ago, but it is still useful today and is a standard reference impedance used in test equipment.
ACM Software System Award Given to seL4 Microkernel
William Gropp, University of Illinois; Pavan Balaji, Meta; Rajeev Thakur, Yanfei Guo, Kenneth Raffenetti, and Hui Zhou (all of Argonne National Laboratory), receive the ACM Software System Award for MPICH, which has powered 30 years of progress in computational science and engineering by providing scalable, robust…
Windows 7 Network Awareness: How Windows knows it has an Internet connection
Have you ever been connecting to a new wireless network and seen the following pop-up balloon?
A lock-free ring-buffer with contiguous reservations (2019)
Building a lock free continuous ring buffer
Make your monorepo feel small with Git’s sparse index
The new sparse index feature makes it feel like you are working in a small repository when working in a focused portion of a monorepo.