Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,944 posts.
You have just made a Bitcoin transaction and you are eager to see if it appears in the next block. You know that the expected time between Bitcoin blocks is 10 minutes. You check the log of your Bitcoin node. It has been 7 minutes since the previous block. You recall that blocks occurrences in Bitcoin are a Poisson…
Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS Lambda@Edge changes duration billing granularity from 50ms down to 1ms
I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 ...
A few minutes ago I came across a Hacker News post that detailed a method of adding search to your static site. As you probably know, adding search to a static site is a bit tricky, because you can’t just send the query to a server and have the server process it and return the results. If you want full-text search…
For some time Elfeed was experiencing a strange, spurious failure. Every so often users were seeing an error (spoiler warning) when updating feeds: “error in process sentinel: Search failed.” If you use Elfeed, you might have even seen this yourself. From the surface it appeared that curl, tasked with the…
Should you be scared of Unix signals?
This is a catalog of things UNIX-like/POSIX-compliant operating systems can do atomically, making them useful as building blocks for thread-safe and multi-process-safe programs without mutexes or read/write locks. The list is by no means exhaustive and I expect it to be updated frequently for the foreseeable future.
The received wisdom suggests that Unix’s unusual combination of fork() and exec() for process creation was an inspired design. In this paper, we argue that fork was a clever hack for machines and programs of the 1970s that has long outlived its usefulness and is now a liability. We catalog the ways in which fork […]
TL;DR : firmware support in Debian sucks, and we need to change this. See the "My preference, and rationale" Section below.
I commented on Lobsters that /tmp is usually a bad idea , which caused some surprise. I suppose /tmp security bugs were common in the 1990s when I was learning Unix, but they are pretty rare now so I can see why less grizzled hackers might not be familiar with the problems.
This post is the third installment of our five-part series on building GitHub’s new homepage: How our globe is built How we collect and use the data behind the globe…
A deep dive into the complexities of optimizing code for SIMD instruction sets across multiple platforms.
From Hypervisor APIs in OS X 10.10 Yosemite in 2014, through early VirtIO kernel extensions in Mojave in 2018, and Arm hypervisor support in Big Sur.
Using a decommissioned Alibaba cloud accelerator card as an FPGA dev board
A deep dive into merykitty's 8-line SWAR temperature parser from the One Billion Row Challenge, using bitwise tricks and ALU magic with no loops or branches.
The async/await saga is a story where each chapter solves the previous chapter's worst problem while introducing new structural costs. The sequential syntax that made async code readable also obscures the thing that matters: which operations actually depend on each other.
In my previous blog post, I compared the performance of my new ARM-based MacBook Pro with my 2017 Intel-based MacBook Pro. I used a number parsing benchmark. In some cases, the ARM-based MacBook Pro was nearly twice as fast as the older Intel-based MacBook Pro. I think that the Apple M1 processor is a breakthrough ……
When Martin Fowler's post about microservices came out in 2014, the teams where I worked were already building service-oriented architectures. That post and the subsequent hype made their way into almost every software team in the world. The "Netflix OSS stack" was the coolest thing back then, allowing engineers…
Last week I was trying to add some testing code to libsecp256k1 and I was pulling out my hair trying to get it to work. No amount of printf was working to illuminate what I was doing wrong. Finally, out of desperation, I thought I would do a quick check to see if there are any compiler bugs related to memcmp , and lo…
What do Photoshop, Matlab, Panic Transmit, and Eclipse have in common? They are among the 299 apps for which macOS applies compatibillity fixes.
How dare you!
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…
Next time you look at a transmission line, I hope you'll focus on the big four properties: characteristic impedance, high-frequency loss, delay, and cros...
This week at USENIX ATC’22, a group of my colleagues 1 from the AWS DynamoDB team are going to be presenting their paper Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service . This paper is a rare look at a real-world distributed system that runs at massive scale.
