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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 163 posts.
Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo:
Cloudflare suffered a service outage on November 18, 2025. The outage was triggered by a bug in generation logic for a Bot Management feature file causing many Cloudflare services to be affected.
A new generation of collaborative software that allows users to retain ownership of their data.
Cloudflare experienced a significant traffic outage on December 5, 2025, starting approximately at 8:47 UTC. The incident lasted approximately 25 minutes before resolution. We are sorry for the impact that it caused to our customers and the Internet. The incident was not caused by an attack and was due to…
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…
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…
When it comes to infrastructure engineering, building a data center is probably closer to building a house than to deploying a Terraform stack.
Learn how we tracked a performance bottleneck to a 15-year-old Git function and fixed it, leading to enhanced efficiency that supports more robust backup strategies and can reduce risk.
Learn why Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY doesn't scale for high-throughput use cases and what architectural alternatives Recall.ai uses in production.
Why you should just use Postgres instead of Kafka for small-scale message queuing and pub-sub patterns. Benchmarks and practical tests included.
Liwei Guo, Zhi Li, Sheldon Radford, Jeff Watts
Or: How JPEG Screenshots Defeated Our Beautiful H.264 WebCodecs Pipeline
Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort spanning half a decade that combines the unique strengths of Apple silicon hardware with our advanced operating system security to provide industry-first, always-on memory safety protection across our devices …
It's waiting for Godot and eventually gives up.
Benjamin Spector* , Jordan Juravsky* , Stuart Sul* , Dylan Lim , Owen Dugan , Simran Arora , Chris Ré
This post explains our recent effort to improve JSON.stringify performance
Initial kernel and subsystem support for new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 posted for review. Learn what’s in the patches and how you can start working with them.
This RFD describes futurelock : a type of deadlock where a resource owned by Future A is required for another Future B to proceed, while the Task responsible for both Futures is no longer polling A . Futurelock is a particularly subtle risk in writing asynchronous Rust.
Take an interactive journey through the history of IO devices, and learn how IO device latency affects performance.
NATS is a popular streaming system. Producers publish messages to streams , and consumers subscribe to those streams, fetching messages from them. Regular NATS streams are allowed to drop messages. However, NATS has a subsystem called JetStream , which uses the Raft consensus algorithm to replicate data among nodes…
Boost PostgreSQL full-text search speed by 50x with simple optimizations. Use VectorChord-BM25 to accelerate and better BM25 ranking in postgres.
We have some very fast AI-generated kernels in pure CUDA-C without using libraries and DSLs such as CUTLASS and Triton. They are performing close to or in some cases even beating the standard expert-optimized production kernels shipped in PyTorch. Some of our highlighted results:
You copied the green screen.
Learn how NAT traversal works, how Tailscale can get through and securely connect your devices directly to each other.
A technical report on three bugs that intermittently degraded Claude's responses: what happened, why fixes took time, and what we're changing.
Databricks offers a unified platform for data, analytics and AI. Build better AI with a data-centric approach. Simplify ETL, data warehousing, governance and AI on the Data + AI Platform.
Securely connect to anything on the internet with Tailscale. Built on WireGuard®️, Tailscale enables you to make finely configurable connections, secured end-to-end according to zero trust principles, between any resources on any infrastructure.
Learn why SQLite-on-the-server fits hyper-scale systems when each tenant gets an isolated database with local reads, durable storage, and simple…
ClickHouse learned to procrastinate strategically. Discover how lazy materialization skips unnecessary column reads to accelerate queries.
