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
4892

Service mesh use cases (2020)

Service mesh is a blazing hot topic in software engineering right now and rightfully so. I think it’s extremely promising technology and I’d love to see it widely adopted (in cases where it truly makes sense). Yet it remains shrouded in mystery for many people and even those who are familiar with it have trouble…

4895

SIMD for Collision

In a previous post SIMD Matters I discussed the big wins I got from graph coloring to make the contact solver faster. That same approach exists in Box3D. I like to call this approach “wide SIMD”. The idea is to process multiple work units at the same time. In the contact solver this means solving four contact points…

4911

Latency Sneaks Up on You

As systems get big, people very reasonably start investing more in increasing efficiency and decreasing costs. That’s a good thing, for the business, for the environment, and often for the customer. Much of the time efficient systems have lower and more predictable latencies, and everybody enjoys lower and more…

4912

How to Write a Computer Emulator

I wrote this document after receiving large amounts of email from people who would like to write an emulator of one or another computer but do not know where to start. Any opinions and advices contained in the following text are mine alone and should not be taken for an absolute truth. The document mainly covers…

4914

Tokyo Cabinet DB: Beyond Key-Value Store

It took Ruby some time to go from an infant research project by Matz to a language we've all come to know so well. Now, another Japanese developer ( Mikio Hirabayashi ) has all the potential to repeat this cycle with his new database project: Tokyo Cabinet . Developed and sponsored by Mixi Inc . (Japanese Facebook)…

4916

The One Second Dash

The Amazon Dash is a $5 WiFi button that summons a truck to deliver you water or other stuff. Want your Dash to do something else? The popular approach is to sniff its ARP requests. This requires that Dash connect to your network, putting you perilously close to having some DUDE delivered with your IoT mood lighting.

4917

On Layout and Web Performance

Outside of initial page load problems, “layout thrashing” is the most common performance problem I see in dynamic web applications. This is particularly true for Single Page Applications which build and destroy views on the fly. However, I’m often amazed by the number of web developers I run into who are unaware of…