Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 553 posts.

Systems & Performance
2021
161

The Container Throttling Problem

This is an excerpt from an internal document David Mackey and I co-authored in April 2019. The document is excerpted since much of the original doc was about comparing possible approaches to increasing efficency at Twitter, which is mostly information that's meaningless outside of Twitter without a large amount of…

165

SerenityOS: Year 3 in Review

SerenityOS is a from-scratch desktop operating system that combines a Unix-like core with the look&feel of 1990s productivity software. It's written in modern C++ and goes all the way from kernel to web browser. The project aims to build everything in-house instead of relying on third-party libraries.

170

Why Prefetch Is Broken

When coding a webpage, sometimes you know something is very likely to be needed, even if it's not needed yet. You can give the browser a hint: <link rel=prefetch href=url> The browser will take a note, and then when it doesn't have anything more important to do it might request url. Later on, if it does turn out…

175

SSH quoting

A while back there was a thread on one of our company mailing lists about SSH quoting, and I posted a long answer to it. Since then a few people have asked me questions that caused me to reach for it, so I thought it might be helpful if I …