Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,947 posts.
Why is my first C++ (m)allocation always 72 KB?? It’s the ’emergency pool’ for exceptions, here’s how I uncovered it using GDB and digging through the source code of libstdc++, glibc and Valgrind!
Introduction Back in 2014, while at Project Zero, I exploited a buffer overflow of a single NUL byte in glibc . Tavis Ormandy had found th...
So you think your favourite FOSS project is moving too fast? Easy, just DOS the developers. Here's a few tips on how to achieve this: On IR...
podman provides an integrated auto-update mechanism, which I recently applied to all of my containers running on feldspaten. The mechanism is nice, but at first appears a bit counter-intuitive. In this post ’m trying to explain how you can use the mechanism and what to watch out for. I’ll start with the trap I think…
Web publication for "PureJaxRL"
Tailscale v1.36 for macOS features a significantly reduced binary size (going from 92MB to 56MB). The effort started out with a chance observation about a surprisingly large executable, and ended up involving some creative approaches using dlopen.
Linux uses an LPC-trie for looking up routes. It provides good performance with low memory use even with millions of routes.
At LaunchDarkly, we ingest nearly 100 terabytes of observability data from our customers every month.
git , Single page HTML , Kindle .mobi , PDF , .epub , HTML for printing , book cover .
This post is about an obscure corner of TCP network programming, a corner where almost everybody doesn’t quite get what is going on. I used to think I understood it, but found out last week that I didn’t.
In the research field of compression, the usual goal is to achieve the best possible compression rate. The best known algorithms, however, are very slow, and sometimes impractical for real-world ap…
This is the first post in a series about JIT compilers. The plan is to take a simple input language and develop some interpreters and JITs for it, in roughtly increasing degree of complexity. It's my hope that by the end of the series readers will have a good understanding of what it takes to develop a JIT compiler…
TLS is not slow, it's unoptimized. A hands-on tour of optimizing nginx to deliver one-RTT Time To First Byte (TTFB) with TLS.
What’s better than programming a GPU with a high-level, Haskell-embedded DSL (domain-specific-language)? Well, perhaps writing portab...
Our continual investments in the performance of Chrome have led to significant improvements in battery life, memory, and the speed of the we...
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Technical Report APA-TR-2006-1201; Title: Almaz S-300P/PT/PS/PMU/PMU1/PMU2 / Almaz-Antey S-400 Triumf / SA-10/20/21 Grumble/Gargoyle ; Abstract: Introductory technical analysis and development history of the Almaz-Antey S-300P family of Surface to Air Missile systems. Includes diagrams, imagery and variant tables…
Fun with LapLink 5 and parallel port file transfers under FreeDOS
Our customers reasonably expect to be able to spend on their card, make bank transfers and pay their bills 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Their lives don’t have downtime for maintenance so nor should we. We dedicate a lot of our engineering effort to minimise the risk of downtime during technical migrations and…
I’m often surprised how long software can keep trying to use compatibility features ages after their best-by date. Now that GCC 4.8 builds on Tige...
This is a post about performance. Most of the time when worrying about the performance of a piece of code the overwhelming advice should be (with apologies to Brendan Gregg) don’t worry about it, yet. However there is one area where I counsel developers to think about the performance implications of a design, and that…
I think that all other considerations are of the extrinsic real-world kind – domain modeling, usability, schedules, platforms, etc. I also think that I can show how any "good" programming practice is mainly aimed at minimizing redundancy, dependencies, or both. I even think that you can tell a "good" programmer from a…
A Story Of realloc (And Laziness) 05 April 2014 A Simple Macro It...
An article explaining why Xen wasn't affected by the recent RETBleed security issue on Intel CPUs.
