Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 569 posts.

Systems & Performance
2024
249

The RAM Myth

The RAM myth is a belief that modern computer memory resembles perfect random-access memory. Cache is seen as an optimization for small data: if it fits in L2, it’s going to be processed faster; if it doesn’t, there’s nothing we can do. Most likely, you believe that code like this is the fastest way to shard data (I’m…

255

RavenDB 6.0.2 (A Jepsen Report)

RavenDB is a distributed document database which repeatedly advertises its support for ACID transactions. 1 It’s intended for OLTP workloads, and offers a variety of ETL paths for exporting data to other systems. Its transactional API revolves around a session handle, which “represents a single business transaction on…

266

SIMD Matters: Graph Coloring

SIMD in game development Often in game development we talk about SIMD. It is the holy grail of CPU performance, often out of reach. The conventional wisdom is that it is difficult to achieve real gains from SIMD. It is tempting to build a math library around SIMD hoping to get some performance gains. However, it often…

270

RP2040 Boot Sequence

This document has been assembled to supplement a set of instructions about writing one's own bootloader for the RP2040. Writing a bootloader requires some understanding of the boot sequence, but it became a bit too cumbersome to include that explanation in the bootloader documentation.