Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 555 posts.

Systems & Performance
2023
214

Unpacking Elixir: Resilience

The nine nines. 99.9999999% of uptime. Whether the AXD301 actually deserves to be held up as a system of nine nines seems debatable. I am not particularly interested in that debate. Erlang has a strong record for reliability and a design intended to help you as a developer and operator achieve your nines. Maybe just…

215

Modern CPUs have a backstage cast

If you take someone with intermediate knowledge of computing in the right areas, and ask them how an x86 machine boots, they'll probably start telling you about how the CPU first comes up in real mode and starts executing code from the 8086 reset vector of FFFF:FFF0. This understanding of how an x86 machine boots has…

219

ECC RAM should be a human right

I am now a staunch advocate for ECC RAM, after the events of last week. You see, over the last several weeks my main desktop workstation has been misbehaving, with occasional freezing and crashing. After some diagnostics I began to suspect a faulty RAM module, and sure enough, upon performing a quick run of memtest86…

221

Amiga Systems Programming in 2023

If you ever get a chance to look through the classic Amiga OS source-code still floating around some murky corners of the internet, it is a thing of beauty and astonishing capabilities. It’s an inspirational piece of computing history with unmatched capabilities for the time. Remember, this was all on a computer…

222

I Built Linux from Scratch

Linux From Scratch or LFS is a project that provides and maintains a set of instructions of how to build your own Linux system from scratch. I am always curious to understand how things work ‘under the hood’, and since I’m a daily Linux user i decided to take on the challenge to try and complete building Linux From…

239

OpenBSD PF versus FreeBSD PF

I encountered yet another discussion about OpenBSD PF versus FreeBSD PF . For those who are new to the discussion: OpenBSD developers created PF in 2001, and it rapidly improved to become the most approachable open source packet filter. FreeBSD ported PF over to its kernel in 2004, with occasional updates since. Today…