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
4711

From VNC to reverse shell

Personal websites are weird. We are mostly past the era of having them, as things like twitter and hosted blog services like Medium have taken them over, but I’m a hold out. I run both my own blog, and have a landing page on the apex domain since the server that hosts the blog (Google App Engine + Cloudflare) is…

4720

Don't trust default timeouts

Modern applications don’t crash; they hang. One of the main reasons for it is the assumption that the network is reliable. It isn’t. When you make a network call without setting a timeout, you are telling your code that you are 100% confident that the call is going to succeed. Would you really take that bet? If you…

4730

FreeBSD Q2 2016 Status Report

This quarter brings several exciting improvements over previous models. We have enhancements from different teams, new features like robust mutexes and support for full disk encryption with GELI. You'll find expanded graphics support, both at the chipset and window manager levels, and ongoing development in many…

4735

Imaging mounted disk volumes under duress

Backups are critical. If you are lucky and organised you have a set of useful backup primitives, such as Point in Time snapshots on your Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS), your disk array controller, or volume manager. However there always seems to be some critical machine in my life that does not fall into these…

4737

The power of two random choices

In many large-scale web services, multiple layers of stateless and stateful services are seperated by load balancers. Load balancing can be done with dedicated hardware, with dedicated software load balancers, using DNS trickery or through a load-balancing mechanism in the client. In large systems, the resources and…

4740

WebOS OSE 2.1

We’re delighted to announce the release of webOS Open Source Edition (OSE) 2.1.0. The highlights of this release are as follows: Change of the default logging system to journald Japanese Virtual Keyboard support and iLib upgrade Bug fix and improvements For more details on this release, see the release notes. Change…