Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,390 posts.
Why CouchDB doesn't scale
This is my attempt to clear up some misconceptions about CouchDB and point out some technical details that a lot of people seem to have over...
Why the secret to speedier highways might be closing some roads: the Braess paradox
"All will be well if you use your mind for your decisions, and mind only your decisions." Help me make more videos and posts! A monthly membership directly supports the channel and allows me to make more videos that inspire students and teachers around the world. You also get early access to new videos. Support with a…
Array
There, that's known as a teaser. You see it in television all the time. "Find out which common household plant devours pets at night... but first ." And then you have to sit through and watch the stuff about Brad and Angelina shacking up / Shaq driving his new Hummer / Hummer's new fragrance before they get to the…
HTTP Archive: jQuery
A recent thread on Github for html5-boilerplate discusses whether there’s a benefit from loading jQuery from Google Hosted Libraries , as opposed to serving it from your local server. They referenced the great article Caching and the Google AJAX Libraries by Steve Webster.
The Day The Standard Library Died
In Prague, the C++ committee took a series of polls on whether to break ABI, and decided not to. There was no applause. But I’m not sure we fully understood what we did and the consequences it could have.
Golang data races to break memory safety
Go is becoming more and more popular as a programming language and getting more scrutiny from a security point of view. You might remember m...
Nick Craver - What it takes to run Stack Overflow
I like to think of Stack Overflow as running with scale but not at scale. By that I meant we run very efficiently, but I still don’t think of us as “big”, n...
Ubuntu on Windows -- The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers
Update: Here's how to get started using Ubuntu on Windows See also Scott Hanselman's blog here I'm in San Francisco this week, attendin...
There Is No Thread
This is an essential truth of async in its purest form: There is no thread.
Writing down (and searching through) every UUID
I couldn't remember every UUID so I wrote them all down
DNSSEC Downtime: List of Outages & Validation Failures
Major DNSSEC Outages and Validation Failures
Amazon's Dynamo
In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the…
Summary of the 1.1 Billion Taxi Rides Benchmarks
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
How Protothreads Really Work
What goes on behind the magical macros in the C protothreads library? Why are they macros? How do the macros work? Read on for the explanation.
A performance comparison of Judy to hash tables
Numerous claims about Judy's performance are made in the Judy whitepaper . I don't think any of those claims are wrong. However, it does not appear that sufficient effort was put in benchmarking Judy against other data structures. Now, it is unlikely there is another data structure that is both as fast and as small as…
Basics of the Unix Philosophy
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data
We use MySQL for storing all of the data in FriendFeed . Our database has grown a lot as our user base has grown. We now store over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.
Jepsen: On the perils of network partitions
This article is part of Jepsen , a series on network partitions. We’re going to learn about distributed consensus, discuss the CAP theorem’s implications, and demonstrate how different databases behave under partition.
Redirect to sslh
My homepage for projects, jokes and bunnies.
He Who Controls the Bootloader
The day before I submitted this column, news hit the net that the other shoe had finally dropped. After months of waiting and wondering what was to become of Be, we learned that Palm, Inc. will be purchasing Be's technology, intellectual property, and assets. While we don't yet know exactly what Palm plans to do with…
Jepsen: Postgres
Previously on Jepsen , we introduced the problem of network partitions . Here, we demonstrate that a few transactions which “fail” during the start of a partition may have actually succeeded.
The Biggest Myths
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
A Million-user Comet Application with Mochiweb, Part 1
In this series I will detail what I found out empirically about how mochiweb performs with lots of open connections, and show how to build a comet application using mochiweb, where each mochiweb connection is registered with a router which dispatches messages to various users. We end up with a working application that…
Bell Labs and CSP Threads
This page is a slice of the history of concurrent programming, focusing on one particular lineage of Hoare's language of communicating sequential processes (CSP) [1] [1a] . Concurrent programming in this style is interesting for reasons not of efficiency but of clarity. That is, it is a widespread mistake to think…
Boundaries
This talk is about using simple values (as opposed to complex objects) not just for holding data, but also as the boundaries between components and subsystems. It moves through many topics: functional programming; mutability's relationship to OO; isolated unit testing with and without test doubles; and concurrency, to…
JSLinux - Technical Notes
In 2011 I wrote the initial version of JSLinux, the first PC/x86 emulator in Javascript running Linux. I reused parts of another of my emulators ( QEMU ) for the x86 helpers and the devices.
The Treacherous Optimization
"I'm going to beat grep by thirty percent!" I confidently crow to anyone who would listen, those foolish enough to enter my office. And my girlfriend too, who's contractually obligated to pay attention to everything I say.
Performance is a Feature
We’ve always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we’re performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There’s plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people
A Whole New World
This talk announces the most ambitious software project I've ever undertaken, then considers why its existence is so surprising (and in some cases frustrating) to people.