Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,947 posts.

Systems & Performance
Any year
3518

Jepsen: Scylla 4.2-rc3

Scylla is a distributed wide-column 1 database which originated as a C++ port of Cassandra, aiming for improved performance. It supports both Cassandra- and DynamoDB -compatible APIs, and is intended for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, including analytics, messaging, and other time-series data.

3519

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…

3524

The macOS Sandbox File Limit

There has recently been some renewed discussion on Twitter about the limitation that the macOS sandbox places on the number of open files an app can access at once. Apps are still running into problems because of this limitation, and there is not a lot of technical detail available on it outside of Apple, so I’d like…

3527

A New Back End for Cranelift

This post will describe my recent work on Cranelift as part of my day job at Mozilla. In this post, I will set some context and describe the instruction selection problem. In particular, I’ll talk about a revamp to the instruction selector and backend framework in general that we’ve been working on.

3531

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…

3540

Philosophy of Coroutines

I encountered the idea as a student, when I first read The Art of Computer Programming . I’d been programming already for most of my childhood, and I was completely blown away by the idea, which was entirely new to me. In fact, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that in the whole of TAOCP that was the single…