Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,944 posts.
What does it take to build a little 68000-based protoboard computer, and get it running Linux? In my case, about three weeks of spare time, plenty of coffee, and a strong dose of stubborness. After banging my head against the wall with problems ranging from the inductance of pushbutton switches to memory leaks in the…
Update (2017/06/12): Added BenchmarkDotNet blog post link. There are many exciting aspects to .NET Core (open source, cross platform, x-copy deployable, etc.) that have been covered in posts on this blog before. To me, though, one of the most exciting aspects of .NET Core is performance. There’s been a lot of…
A recent blog post posed the question Why do we use the Linux kernel's TCP stack?. It triggered a very interesting discussion on Hacker News.
FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store Zhou, et al., 2021
Experienced professional software engineer based in York, UK
Recent optimizations in Tailscale improve UDP throughput, boosting performance for QUIC, HTTP/3, and other UDP-based applications on Linux.
vfmaddrnd231pd is a unique instruction from the FMA instruction set. Most instructions in that set have mnemonics like vfmadd231pd, but here rnd means something very specific. The Intel Software Development Manual documents it as: VFMADDRND231PD – Fused Multiply-Add of Packed Double-Precision Floating-Point Values…
It'll bite you some day
In this blog post, I delve into the comparison of memory consumption between asynchronous and multi-threaded programming across popular languages like Rust, ...
Later this year, on November 21, 2017, D-Bus will see its 15th birthday. An impressive age, only shy of the KDE and GNOME projects, whose collaboration inspired the creation of this independent IPC system. While still relied upon by the most recent KDE and GNOME releases, D-Bus is not free of criticism. Despite its…
Verilog is the de facto abstraction for programming today’s FPGAs. RTL programming is fine if you want to use FPGAs for their traditional purpose as circuit emulators, but it’s not the right thing for the new view of FPGAs as general-purpose computational accelerators.
Notion engineers sped up Notion's browser speed with WASM SQLite
Users on 64-bit Windows who download Firefox can get our 64-bit version by default. That means you get a more secure version of Firefox, one that also crashes a whole lot less . How much less? In our tests so far, 64-bit Firefox reduced crashes by 39% on machines with 4GB of RAM or more.
I'm really proud to announce the first release of the Socket.IO C++ Client on GitHub!
How do you fit a dictionary in 64kb RAM? Unix engineers solved it with clever data structures and compression tricks. Here's the fascinating story behind it.
Canonical and Amazon Web Services have been working closely together to create the best experience of the world’s most popular cloud OS, on the world’s most popular public cloud. Official Ubuntu guest images have been available on AWS for years, and underlie the majority of workloads on the service—whether you use the…
I talked about the importance of reading foundational papers last week. To followup, here is my compilation of foundational papers in the d...
This post discusses an atypical GPL violation. Unlike most GPL violations Conservancy faces, in this case, a third-party entity holds a magic wand that can instantly resolve the situation. Oracle is the primary copyright holder of ZFS, and, despite nearly eight years (going back to the days of Sun's control of the…
Today, SiFive introduces the new HiFive platform for professional RISC-V developers, the HiFive Unmatched! The HiFive Unmatched enables developers to create the RISC-V-based software they need for RISC-V platforms. From real-time operating systems to custom Linux distributions, and the compilers, libraries, and…
SQLite is fast, really fast. On a single ~40€ / m commodity server, it can sustain ~168,000 reads and ~8000 writes per second, concurrently. Because it's an embedded library designed for client-side applications such as embedded systems and phone & desktop applications, SQLite databases have to be co-located…
Cloudflare's jpegtran implementation was optimized for Intel CPUs. Now that we intend to integrate ARMv8 processors, new optimizations for those are required.
After noticing a worrying pattern in Gitaly's performance, we uncovered an issue with fork locking affecting virtual memory size. Here's how we figured out the problem and how to fix it.
Designing the world's first open source Ethernet switch ASIC. An unmanaged cut-through 3-port 100Mbps switch fabbed on Global Foundries 180 nm.
A novel technique for implementing dynamic language interpreters in Go, applied to the Vitess SQL evaluation engine
