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A Heisenbug lurking in async Python
Textual is a TUI framework for Python, inspired by modern web development.
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Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 2,560 posts.
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Roblox October Outage Postmortem
Roblox is a global platform where millions of people gather together every day to imagine, create, and share experiences with each other in immersive, user-generated 3D worlds.
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Initial preview of GUI app support for the Windows Subsystem for Linux
A year ago at BUILD 2020 we introduced our goal to bring Linux GUI applications to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to run Linux GUI applications. We
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SQLite Internals: Pages and B-trees
Let's open a hex editor and see what this thing is made of
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Cloud Computing Without Containers
We have a cloud computing platform called Workers. Unlike essentially every other cloud computing platform I know of, it doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. We believe that is the future of Serverless and cloud computing in general, and I’ll try to convince you why.
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Inside a fast CSS engine
Project Quantum is a major rewrite of Firefox’s internals to make Firefox fast. We’re swapping in parts from our experimental browser, Servo, and making massive improvements to other parts of ...
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Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
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QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
QNX is changing the game for engineers and software developers, providing free access to QNX software and resources for non-commercial use.
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We saved millions in SSD costs by upgrading our filesystem
During COVID we experienced rapid growth in the amount of data we ingest. This post details some of the problems this caused us and how we solved them.
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How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice Users Using WebRTC
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
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Let's Remove the Global Interpreter Lock
Hello everyone The Python community has been discussing removing the Global Interpreter Lock for a long time. There have been various atte...
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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon
The release of Apple Silicon based Macs at the end of last year generated a flurry of news and some surprises at the machine’s performance.
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The August 17 outage
An update on the August 17 outage and the steps we're taking to improve reliability.
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Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
Have you ever had to decide between a general purpose tool and one built for a very specific purpose? The general purpose tools can be used to solve many different problems, but may not be the best choice for any particular one. Purpose-built tools excel at one task, but you may need to do that […]
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Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
We’ve been working hard on making Firefox even faster and we’re extremely happy to report that this has resulted in an improvement in speed.
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How Browsers Work
This comprehensive primer on the internal operations of WebKit and Gecko is the result of much research done by Israeli developer Tali Garsiel. Over a few years, she reviewed all the published data about browser internals and spent a lot of time reading web browser source code. She wrote:
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A terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day at Slack
This story describes the technical details of the problems that caused the Slack downtime on May 12th, 2020. To learn more about the process behind incident response for same outage, read Ryan Katkov’s post, “All Hands on Deck”. On May 12, 2020, Slack had our first significant outage in a long time. We published a…
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Improving Firefox stability on Linux
A year ago at Mozilla we started to improve Firefox stability on Linux. This effort quickly became an example of good synergies between FOSS.
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SQL Maxis: Why We Ditched RabbitMQ and Replaced It with a Postgres Queue
Embracing our SQL Maxi nature: how we ripped out RabbitMQ from our infrastructure and replaced it with a Postgres queue.
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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.
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HolyJit: A New Hope
tl;dr: We believe there is a safer and easier way of writing a Jit. Current State Today, all browsers’ Jits share a similar design. This ...
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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.
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ReactOS releases 0.4.8 with experimental Vista/7/10 software compatibility
ReactOS is a free, opensource reimplementation of windows
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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.
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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.
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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().
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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…
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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: