Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,947 posts.
OpenSSL sucks. The BoringSSL and AWS-LC forks are Googled and Amazoned to death; they don't care about anyone but their own use cases. I can't remember ever having a good experience with software using GnuTLS. LibreSSL is incomplete... FOREWARD This post is about the experience of taking a leap of …
Linux containers, Kubernetes, artificial intelligence, blockchain and too many other technical breakthroughs to list all share a common component - Linux, the same workhorse that has driven mission-critical, production systems for nearly two decades. Today, we’re offering a vision of a Linux foundation to power the…
What does a relational database designed specifically for local SSDs look like? Postgres, MySQL, SQLite and many others were invented in the 90s and 00s, the era of spinning disks. A local NVMe SSD has ~1000x improvement in both throughput and latency. Design decisions like write-ahead logs, large page sizes, and…
PostgreSQL Talk
I've been porting the AndroidX collection library to Kotlin multiplatform to experiment with binary compatibility, performance, tooling, and the different memory models. Some of the data structures in the library use array-based binary trees to store elements. The Java code has a lot of shifts to replace power-of-two…
I experienced intermittent stuttering when my PC ran Linux and Windows. A mix of hardware, firmware, and driver issues created a difficult to diagnose problem.
Discover how Amazon Search combines technology and culture to empower its builder teams, ensuring platform resilience through Chaos Engineering.
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
As a rule, "sophisticated" progrmming is pretty boring - optimizing the unnecessary to speed up the uninteresting. Here, however, is an incredibly sophisticated package intended for fun and games. The more you know about software, the more astounded you will become as you read this.
Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.
Dash knows your context, your team, and your work, so your team can stay organized, easily find and share knowledge, and keep projects secure, all from one place.
Algebraic effects and handlers provide a modular abstraction for expressing effectful computation, allowing the programmer to separate the expression of an effectful computation from its implementation. In this post, I will present an extension to OCaml for programming with linear algebraic effects, and demonstrate…
Many products at Cloudflare aren’t possible without pushing the limits of network hardware and software to deliver improved performance, increased efficiency, or novel capabilities such as soft-unicast, our method for sharing IP subnets across data centers. Happily, most people do not need to know the intricacies of…
This is the second post in the article series about Unix utilities that you should know about. In this post I will introduce you to the netcat tool or simply nc. Netcat is often referred to as a Swiss Army knife utility, and for a good reason. Just like the multi-function usefulness of the venerable Swiss Army…
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
People talk a lot about “pull” vs. “push” based query engines, and it’s pretty obvious what that means colloquially, but some of the details can be a bit hard to figure out.
Updated in 2025-09. The ELF object file format is adopted by many UNIX-like operating systems. While I've previously delved into the control structures of ELF and its predecessors, tracing the historical evolution of ELF and its relationship with the System V ABI can be interesting in itself. The format consists of…
When receiving bytes from the network, we often assume that they are unicode strings, encoded using something called UTF-8. Sadly, not all streams of bytes are valid UTF-8. So we need to check the strings. It is probably a good idea to optimize this problem as much as possible. In earlier work, we showed that ……
Recently I’ve been deliberately working on some areas of Firefox I’m unfamiliar with, particular relating to graphics. This led me to rewriting Firefox’s BMP decoder and learn a number of interesting things along the way.
Experienced professional software engineer based in York, UK
On May 21st 2019, we broke search service out of vehicle-service. It was faster, cheaper, and better!
A very sus sysctl in the XNU kernel.
Meet Alice. Alice uses your web service. Alice, like most humans, measures her time in seconds and minutes. Alice says your service is slow. You tell Alice that the mean request to your service completes in 100ms, but Alice says that her mean wait time is 1s.
