Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,560 posts.

Systems & Performance
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77

How Browsers Work

This comprehensive primer on the internal operations of WebKit and Gecko is the result of much research done by Israeli developer Tali Garsiel. Over a few years, she reviewed all the published data about browser internals and spent a lot of time reading web browser source code. She wrote:

89

Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

AWS’s Sergey Melnik, along with HN commenters matashii and Ants Aasma, have identified the cause of Long Fork in PostgreSQL clusters. As described a 2013 mailing list post , the order in which a PostgreSQL primary makes transactions visible is determined by an in-memory lock. Secondaries, however, make transactions…