Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,942 posts.
Ubuntu still has not released patch for Linux 0day RCE in almost 3 weeks
No patched kernels are available yet for 22.04, 24.04, or 26.04 despite a CVSS 9.8 rating.
Twenty years of Valgrind
It has been twenty years since Valgrind 1.0 was released.
Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 series
Explore the agentic AI PCs, Googlebook laptops, Linux support and partner devices powered by Snapdragon unveiled at Snapdragon Summit 2026.
Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough
Xe Iaso's personal website.
An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
Linux Load Averages: Solving the Mystery
Linux load averages explained, including why they include the uninterruptible I/O sleep state.
/dev/null is an ACID compliant database
/dev/null is web scale
Blog hosted on a Nintendo Wii
If you are reading this message, the experiment below is still ongoing. This page was served to you by a real Nintendo Wii.
Speed of Rust vs. C
The run-time speed and memory usage of programs written in Rust should about the same as of programs written in C, but overall programming style of these languages is different enough that it's hard to generalize their speed. This is a summary of where they're the same, where C is faster, and where Rust is faster.
PCI Express on the Raspberry Pi 4
After the daily dose of Hackaday - and with an idea that seemed very doable, and actually, with some improvements can be easily reproducible.
A single line of code made a 24-core server slower than a laptop
Imagine you wrote a program for a pleasingly parallel problem, where each thread does its own independent piece of work, and the threads don’t need to coordi...
ReactOS releases 0.4.8 with experimental Vista/7/10 software compatibility
ReactOS is a free, opensource reimplementation of windows
A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine
Engineers at MIT and NREL have developed a heat engine with no moving parts that is as efficient as a steam turbine.
macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years
Why does it take 2 years to realise that macOS has been checking signing certificate validity online?
A good day to trie-hard: saving compute 1% at a time
Pingora handles 35M+ requests per second, so saving a few microseconds per request can translate to thousands of dollars saved on computing costs. In this post, we share how we freed up over 500 CPU cores by optimizing one function and announce trie-hard, the open source crate that we created to do it.
SQLite small blob storage: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem
SQLite reads and writes small blobs (for example, thumbnail images) 35% faster¹ than the same blobs can be read from or written to individual files on disk using fread() or fwrite().
Hard numbers in the Wayland vs. X11 input latency discussion
Date: 2025-01-26 Git: https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00016-wayland-input-latency.md
Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4
AWS’s Sergey Melnik, along with HN commenters matashii and Ants Aasma, have identified the cause of Long Fork in PostgreSQL clusters. As described a 2013 mailing list post , the order in which a PostgreSQL primary makes transactions visible is determined by an in-memory lock. Secondaries, however, make transactions…
Use mmap with care
When we implemented the git portion of Sublime Merge , we chose to use mmap for reading git object files. This turned out to be considerably more difficult than we had first thought. Using mmap in desktop applications has some serious caveats, and here's why:
Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was…
Call Me Maybe: MongoDB Stale Reads
Please note: our followup analysis of 3.4.0-rc3 revealed additional faults in MongoDB’s replication algorithms which could lead to the loss of acknowledged documents–even with Majority Write Concern, journaling, and fsynced writes.
Jepsen: MongoDB 4.2.6
2020-05-26: MongoDB identified a bug in the transaction retry mechanism which they believe was responsible for the anomalies observed in this report; a patch is scheduled for 4.2.8.
Running a Unix-like OS on a home-built CPU with a home-built C compiler
[Thanks for many comments and votes on Hacker News! ] It’s been two years since I started working as a software engineer. I sometimes tell my colleagues about a student project I did in my junior year of university, and it’s so well-received that I’m writing this post. 1 Now, let me ask you a question. Have you ever…
Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector
Fil-C uses a parallel concurrent on-the-fly grey-stack Dijkstra accurate non-moving garbage collector called FUGC (Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector). You can find the source code for the collector itself in fugc.c , though be warned, that code cannot possibly work without lots of support logic in the rest of the…