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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 340 posts.
I don't normally do follow-ups and never this quick. After posting that last article, it was fun to read the comments on Reddit and Hacker News as they rolled in. I even found other discussions . I couldn't help wonder, "Could I have made it even more performant?" . After heading home I decided to take another look.
Let's talk about the "Windows Baseline Security Mode," too.
Discover how Bootc and OSTree are revolutionizing Linux system deployment, offering modern, efficient, and immutable management.
Modern processors have the ability to execute many instructions per cycle, on a single core. To be able to execute many instructions per cycle in practice, processors predict branches. I have made the point over the years that modern CPUs have an incredible ability to predict branches. It makes benchmarking difficult…
So where has the last six months gone ? I was planning on getting images done for Fedora 44 Beta but I was unwell and busy and ran out of time. So what better time to get them out than Pi Day! .
For many years, I sometimes discovered that commands I was sure I had run were no longer present in my Z shell history file (~/.zsh_history). In this article, I will show you how I tracked down the bug. Spoiler: ultimately, patching Zsh to make it crash loudly and analyzing the crash’s core dump was the winning…
In the world of matching decompilation, projects use a tool which consumes an input binary and lifts objects for comparison and linkage.
If we are running any eBPF workload or writing eBPF code, we want to measure its performance impact, and in this post we will demonstrate an example of how to do it. In this example, our goal is to measure the performance of file open operations, one of the most critical functions in the OS. Our code used file open…
Someone opened a PR to implement readahead in Turso. It was a throwaway implementation, but a good excuse to measure io_uring and understand more about it.
A WebAssembly module's linear memory can be shared directly with the Apple Silicon GPU: no copies, no serialization, no intermediate buffers. Here's how the zero-copy chain works, what we measured, and what it enables for stateful AI inference.
Two services running on the same machine. One of them opens a listening TCP socket bound to localhost, the other one connects to that. They exchange data. Every now and then , the service that initiated the connection gets an ECONNRESET while reading data from the socket -- but no other errors show up in the logs, no…
When talking about TLA+, I keep referring to "abstraction" as the most important thing to learn . And it is about the hardest to learn as w...
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about scaffolding and languages for managing systems of LLMs coordinating with each other — new programming languages might be the ideal solution for this area.
After learning Apple killed off FireWire (IEEE 1394) support in macOS 26 Tahoe, I started looking at alternatives for old FireWire equipment like hard drives, DV cameras, and A/V gear. I own an old Canon GL1 camera, with a 'DV' port. I could plug that into an old Mac (like the dual G4 MDD above) with FireWire—or even…
The author of Java 26's MemoryMXBean.getTotalGcCpuTime() analyzes the CPU-memory trade-off and why pause times fail to capture explicit GC cost.
I want to make this clear in the first sentence because its biggest chance that people will read it – this article is entirely based on work done by Christian Hofstede-Kuhn (Larvitz) that wro…
I’m writing this so you don’t slap your forehead like I almost did when I decided to run swap in production to absorb memory spikes.
In 1994 I got my first computer: an Intel i486 DX2-66 with 4 MB RAM and a 512MB harddisk. The software was IBMs OS/2 and Microsofts Windows 3.11. In the next four years I was upgrading this machine every few months with more RAM (up to 16MB), a CD-ROM-drive and a soundblaster card. So I learned upgrading this machine…
Before we explore FreeBSD jails, it is worth refreshing our understanding of how Linux solved the same problem with LXC (Linux Containers).
To kick off 2026, I had clear objectives in mind: decommissioning my trusty VPS and setting up its successor. Embracing a complete paradigm shift, I built myself a container-centric, declarative, and low-maintenance setup for the years to come.
In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor ...
Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output until the buffer…
In computing, the terms big endian and little endian refer to the order in which a value's bytes are stored in memory: with the most significant (big) or least significant (little) part first.
People pick languages differently with LLMs.
Published: 01-08-2026 20:08 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
This blog post has been archived! SpacetimeDB has improved a lot since I initially published this technical review, and most of the technical details in it no longer apply.
This essay explores the cost of multitasking through computer science concepts like context switching and advocates for the focus found in single-threaded moments.
In keeping with my passion (?) for displaying local news articles in unexpected places , I figured it would be a fun project to try and see what it would take to display current local news on the Nintendo Wii console’s News Channel .
Bringing back mid-2000s Video conferencing in Apple iChat
The historic go-to solution for network booting is PXE. PXE is based on DHCP and TFTP. It is tricky to correctly configure, even trickier to make it highly available and good luck with the security with this clear-text unsigned protocol.
