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Speed Is the Killer Feature
Teams consistently overlook speed. Instead, they add more features (which ironically make things slower). Products bloat over time and performance goes downhill.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,387 posts.
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M4 Mac mini's efficiency
I had to pause some of my work getting a current-gen AMD graphics card running on the Pi 5 and testing a 192-core AmpereOne server to quickly post on the M4's efficiency. I expected M4 to be better than M1/M2 (I haven't personally tested M3), and I hoped it would at least match the previous total-system-power…
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IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior
(Screenshot by someone on Twitter two weeks ago. I can’t find the tweet now — sorry.)
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The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan
December 2020 Update: Lo and behold, the Pi Foundation tacitly acknowledges the Pi needs a fan in the official case, because now they sell the Case Fan! The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pi 4 announcement blog post touted the Pi 4 as providing "PC-like level of performance for most users". The Foundation even offers a…
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Undocumented Catalina file access change
It's well known that if you drag a file from Finder and drop it into Terminal, the full path of the file will output in Terminal. The same behavior occurs with copy and paste too. This has always been a very convenient but innocuous operation… until macOS 10.15 Catalina. I've discovered that on Catalina, pasting a…
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Changing std:sort at Google’s scale and beyond
TL;DR; We are changing std::sort in LLVM’s libcxx. That’s a long story of what it took us to get there and all possible consequences, bugs you might encounter with examples from open so…
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Executable Is a SQLite Database
I have been probably obsessed with two things in the last few years: Nix as a tool to explore innovative ideas that require the capability to rebuild the world and replacing ELF with SQLite as an executable format. You might have noticed that these two ideas are well suited to each other.
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What Does an Idle CPU Do?
In the last post I said the fundamental axiom of OS behavior is that at any given time, exactly one and only one task is active on a CPU. But if there’s absolutely nothing to do, then what? It turns
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Rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia
On many Unix-based operating systems, rsync is a command line tool for transferring and synchronizing files on a computer, either between storage attached directly to the computer or between anothe…
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The computers are fast, but you don't know it
The computers are fast but you don't know it: Speeding up your Python functions with Cython & C++
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Windows Defender is enough, if you harden it
This article is not intended to convince you to abandon your current antivirus solutions. In this post I would like to share my observations and ways to improve the effectiveness of Defender. You don’
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Surprisingly Slow
I have an affinity for performance optimization and making software as efficient as possible. Over the years, I've encountered specific instances and common patterns that make software or computers slow. In this post, I'll shine a spotlight on some of them.
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Extreme Pi Boot Optimization
🚀 3.5 sec to Linux userspace code
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John Carmack on inlined code (2014)
(Here begins a comment written by John Carmack in 2014, about an email he sent to a programmers’ mailing list in 2007.)
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How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner
A high-level overview of how PostgreSQL stores data on disk, covering segments, pages and more.
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Why Skylake CPUs Are Sometimes 50% Slower
I got a call that on newer hardware some performance regression tests have become slower. Not a big deal. Usually it is a bad configuration somewhere in Windows or some BIOS settings were set to no…
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WebP: The WebPage Compression Format
I want to provide a smooth experience to my site visitors, so I work on accessibility and ensure it works without JavaScript enabled. I care about page load time because some pages contain large illustrations, so I minify my HTML. But one thing makes turning my blog light as a feather a pain in the ass.
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I
Apple’s latest line of Macs includes their in-house “M1” system-on-chip, featuring a custom GPU. This poses a problem for those of us in the Asahi Linux project who wish to run Linux on our devices, as this custom Apple GPU has neither public documentation nor open source drivers. Some speculate it might descend from…
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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
How Pi's minimal harness improves coding-agent cost and performance, with examples from Databricks and Shopify's pi-autoresearch extension.
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Things I learned from building a production database
In 2017, I went to Facebook on a sabbatical from my faculty position at Yale. I created a team to build a storage system called Delos at the bottom of the Facebook stack (think of it as Facebook’s version of Chubby). We hit production with a 3-person team in less than a year; and subsequently scaled the team to 30+…
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SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases
The name SQLite is a nice name, but the "lite" part is misleading, it sounds like it is only useful for tiny things - which is very wrong. SQLite should be named AwesomeSQL, because that is what it is. SQLite is probably the only database you will ever need in most cases.
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The JVM is not that heavy
Mostly my opposition to Clojure is the JVM. That sh*t is heavy. This came up in the ZA Tech Slack team several weeks ago. While watching some Clojure talks...
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Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM
Earlier this year, I blogged about work I did to improve VRAM management for games. Now, after many months of floating around in mailing lists, the kernel patches are finally merged upstream and queued for Linux 7.3! Hooray!
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My server is a phone now
rooting a CMF Phone 1 to run my personal infrastructure at home.
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Write Your Own Virtual Machine
In this tutorial, I will teach you how to write your own virtual machine (VM) that can run assembly language programs, such as my friend’s 2048 or my Roguelike . If you know how to program, but would like to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on inside a computer and better understand how programming…
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