Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,909 posts.
Unison is a pure functional programming language that comes with a few revolutionary ideas. Seriously, it makes everything we’re used to, like long builds, dependency version conflicts, tests that run every single build even when nothing checked by them has changed, manual encoding and serialization of data, and lots…
After nearly 6 years since R1/alpha4, Haiku R1/beta1 has been released. See “Release Notes” for the (lengthy) release notes, “Press contact”, for press inquiries … and “Get Haiku!” to skip all that and just …
Steve Huffman talks about Reddit’s approach to data storage in a High Scalability post from 2010. I was surprised to learn that they only have two tables in their database.
I love mental models. They’re crucial to understanding complex systems, allowing us to intuitively grasp and solve complex problems.
Physics likes optimization! Subject to its boundary conditions, the time evolution of a physical system is a critical point for a quantity called an action. This point of view sets the stage for Noether's principle , a remarkable correspondence between continuous invariances of the action and conservation laws of the…
For most data scientists, a toolkit like scipy/matplotlib or R becomes so familiar that it becomes almost an extension of their own mind. When fleshing out an idea, we will just open up ipython, write a few lines of code, and display the plot on the screen to get …
Today, GitHub can repack even the largest repositories we host in a fraction of the time it used to take. Here's how we did it, and why.
Just two years ago (it seems like yesterday), I introduced you to Amazon Aurora in my post Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS. In that post I told you how the RDS team took a fresh, unconstrained look at the relational database model and explained how they built a…
We are excited to announce that Automated Certificate Management is generally available, at no additional charge, for all applications running on Hobby...
Although the main interface between applications and a Vitess database is through the MySQL protocol, Vitess is a large and complex distributed system, and all the communication between the different services in a Vitess cluster is performed through GRPC .
While writing the documentation for Org-roam, it occurred to me that I have things to say that do not belong in the documentation. I wrote Org-roam because Org-mode simply didn’t have the utilities to enable the kind of note-taking workflow I wanted. I don’t want to be prescriptive about how note-taking should be…
In this series of articles, I aim to demonstrate how OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX work by writing a simplified clone from scratch. Surprisingly, many people struggle with the initial hurdle of learning a 3D graphics API. To help with this, I have prepared a short series of lectures, after which my students are…
The story of how Porsche tried and failed miserably at its hostile takeover of Volkswagen.
*if you include word2vec.
For the past few months I’ve been compiling a list of books for a deep dive into interesting technical topics. My theory is that working on projects based on these topics will be like strong individual threads I can weave into epic hacks. This list is basically a curriculum for decades of learning about the wonders of…
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
This entry is cross-posted on the datadog blog . If you want to learn more about Datadog or how we deal with the mountain of data we receive, check it out!
Typically, if you're designing a storage system - such as a filesystem, or a database - one of your major concerns is how to store the data on disk. You have to take care of allocating space for the objects to be stored, as well as storing the indexing data; you have to worry about what happens when you want to extend…
Preface In October 2023 I learned about HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack, dubbed “the largest DDoS attack to date”. I didn’t have deep knowledge of HTTP/2 back then. I knew its basics like frames or HPACK but I was focusing more on HTTP/1.1 protocol and programming languages vulnerabilities. I decided to dedicate time to…
The National Security Agency (NSA) has recently declassified an amazing letter that John Nash sent to it in 1955. It seems that around the year 1950 Nash tried to interest some US security organs …
You know those things that, once you learn about them for the first time, you start seeing them absolutely everywhere? Recently, that’s been my experience with problem-solution ordering issues. They keep cropping up: not just in the context of gam...
A new change in Iceland’s government means that joining the EU is back on the cards for Iceland.
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
Coinbase is trotting out its usual flawed arguments now that it's facing a lawsuit from the SEC, and more pushback is needed.
