Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 543 posts.

Systems & Performance
2025
312

Faster Index I/O with NVMe SSDs

The Marginalia Search index has been partially rewritten to perform much better, using new data structures designed to make better use of modern hardware. This post will cover the new design, and will also touch upon some of the unexpected and unintuitive performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs when it comes to read…

313

Lessons from the PG&E outage

At Waymo, our mission is to be the world’s most trusted driver. We know trust is built through consistent behavior over time—earned through every mile we drive and every interaction we have with the community. This past Saturday, as a widespread PG&E outage cut power to nearly one-third of San Francisco, our service…

316

Rustls Server-Side Performance

In past years, the Rustls project has been happy to receive substantial investments from the ISRG. One of our goals has been to improve performance without compromising on safety. We last posted about our performance improvements in October of 2024, and we're back to talk about another round of improvements. What is…