3571
Avery’s laws of Wi-Fi reliability
Hello everyone! After many years of using a massively hacked-up version of dcoombs's NITLog page generator to host these pages, I've become,...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,947 posts.
3572
Computers Can Be Understood
Computers and computer systems are build up from deterministic, comprehensible, building blocks. Their operations and behaviors can be understood and reasoned about. I relate my personal beliefs and mindset on this point, and explore some manifestations and ramifications of this philosophy.
3573
Staring at the Sun: Dalvik vs. Asm.js vs. Native
As many of you are probably already aware, Mozilla has recently gotten into the mobile OS space with Firefox OS. Firefox OS is built using ...
3574
Look Before You Leap – The Coming Leap Second and AWS
My colleague Mingxue Zhao sent me a guest post designed to make sure that you are aware of an important time / clock issue. Note: This post was first published on May 18, 2015. We made some important additions and corrections on May 25, 2015. — Jeff; The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems (IERS) […]
3575
How does iCloud work? Plus a new version of Cirrus
Differences between CloudKit and iCloud Drive, what each does, and how it works. New version of Cirrus to test and check iCloud function.
3576
JIT: So you want to be faster than an interpreter on modern CPUs
Since my previous blog entry about JIT compiler for PostgreSQL, sadly not much happened due to a lack of time, but still some things were done (biggest improvement was the port to ARM64, a few optimizations, implementing more opcodes…). But I am often asking myself how to really beat the interpreter… And on “modern”…
3577
How the .NET Runtime Loads a Type
It is something we take for granted every time we run a .NET program, but it turns out that loading a Type or class is a fairly complex process.
3578
Allocating on the Stack
A description of some of the recent changes to do allocations on the stack instead of the heap.
3579
CentOS Stream
Today, Red Hat has introduced a new Linux development model into the CentOS community: CentOS Stream, a developer-forward, faster-moving distribution that helps community members, partners and others take full advantage of open innovation.
3580
It’s Time for a Modern Synthesis Kernel
I had a student (Fred Smith) who worked on extensions to Popcorn (the predecessor to Cyclone) that supported run-time code generation in a lightweight fashion. Here’s a paper describing part of the system: https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/5812 . Fred’s thesis had a bunch more.
3581
Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry
In 1985, Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor, the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture. To improve performance, the ...
3582
3583
How concurrency works: A visual guide
Welcome to Waqas' blog
3584
Writing a Memory Allocator (2019)
Video lectureMutator, Allocator, CollectorMemory blockAllocator interfaceMemory alignmentMemory mappingFreeing the objectsBlocks reuseFirst-fit searchAssignmentsNext-fit searchBest-fit searchBlocks splittingBlocks coalescingExplicit Free-listSegregated-list searchOptimizing the storageCustom sbrkConclusion This is the…
3585
Tao: Facebook’s distributed data store for the social graph
The papers over the next few weeks will be from (or related to) research from VLDB 2021 - on the horizon is one of my favorite systems conferences SOSP . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions about papers to read! These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you…
3586
3587
Erlang ARM32 JIT is born
A modular embedded ecosystem—bare-metal hardware, software stacks, and a cloud platform for real-time IoT and distributed systems.
3588
Magic-trace: Diagnose tricky performance issues with Intel Processor Trace
Intel Processor Trace is a hardware technology that can record all program execution flow along with timing information accurate to around 30ns. As far as I ...
3589
Faster zlib/DEFLATE decompression on the Apple M1 (and x86)
DEFLATE is a relatively slow compression algorithm from 1991, which (along with its wrapper format, zlib) is incredibly widely used, for example in the PNG, Zip and Gzip file formats and the HTTP, …
3590
Efficient string copying and concatenation in C
Martin Sebor looks at C string handling functions used to copy and concatenate strings and examines ways to improve their efficiency.
3591
3592
3593
3594
Node.js running in the new Airbus A350 inflight servers
A couple of months ago Finnair announced the launch of the new A350 aircraft, making it the first European airline to start operating the model. We are
3595
3596
Not knowing the /proc file system
Overview Edit: this post was discussed on hacker news Some of the comments contained valuable reviews of the C code listed below. I’ve appended some edits after the original listing. I’ve been working quite with files and file systems on Linux recently. Mostly from the vantage point of either a shell or a python…
3597
JIT-optimized Ruby can outperform a C extension
YJIT’s ability to improve performance by adapting to run-time behavior can increase the speed of our code in a way that dropping down to C can’t. As such, I think we should reconsider the common wisdom that “rewriting our Ruby in C” is the ideal path to performance optimization and take a serious look at “rewriting…
3598
3599
Don't “let it crash”, let it heal
Don't "let it crash". Let it heal.
3600
NixOS for the Impatient
Using NixOS for a more tractable computing setup.