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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
The real enemy addressed by inlining is unexpected dependency and mutation of state, which functional programming solves more directly and completely. However, if you are going to make a lot of state changes, having them all happen inline does have advantages; you should be made constantly aware of the full horror of…
In the ELF format there are two ways of providing a hash table of symbols. DT_HASH and DT_GNU_HASH . The first one is part of SYSV generic ABI and is well documented and marked as mandatory. DT_GNU_HASH is a newer, smaller, and faster replacement that is not documented , implemented in a few places (Glibc, GNU ld…
Memory safety is all the rage these days. But what does the term even mean? That turns out to be harder to nail down than you may think. Typically, people use this term to refer to language...
The goal of Explanations is to try to allow people to play with fun parts of computers. Graphics, compression, audio. The tagline is my biggest inspiration: "Play, don't show", riffing off the typical "Show, don't tell" rule of writers and authors everywhere. Why bother giving a diagram when I give you an inspector…
Yes, you read that right... for $8 you can run linux on a RISC-V computer. And not just a stripped down kernel without an MMU. No, t...
This post tells about my journey on fast-booting a Raspberry Pi 3 (RPI). In addition to that, some optimizations are discussed that can be applied to a Qt (QML) application. At the end, we will have a …
OpenZFS 2.3.0 will be released any day now, and it includes the new “Fast Dedup” feature. My team at Klara spent many months in 2023 and 2024 working on it, and we reckon it’s pretty good, a huge step up from the old dedup as well as being a solid base for further improvements. I’ve been watching various forums and…
A generalised solution to distributed consensus Howard & Mortier, arXiv’19 This is a draft paper that Heidi Howard recently shared with the world via Twitter, and here’s the accompanying …
Is it possible to hit a million requests per second with Python? Probably not until recently.
I haven't used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, Eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail, even…
At last – we’ve done it! I’ve anticipated this day for ages – the day when the first commercially available mass market hardware device based our own secure operating system landed on my desk.
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More about this in the article I wrote to accompany my talk at EuroBSDCon 2024 . Please note: This article was (unexpectedly) quite popular and many...
This is a trade-off: you can't represent a leap second, and your time is guaranteed to go backwards. On the other hand, every day has exactly 86,400 seconds, and you don't need a table of all previous and future leap seconds in order to format Unix time as human-preferred hours-minutes-seconds.
It's not quite the number of seconds since 1 January 1970.
Performance comparison of counting and sorting word frequencies in various languages (Python, Go, C++, C, AWK, Forth, and Rust)
What was the key to successfully learning to drive, ride a bike, or speak a foreign language? Confidence, and it’s every bit as important in computing, and in macOS.
I've had a long history playing around with Raspberry Pis and other Single Board Computers (SBCs); from building a cluster of Raspberry Pis to run Drupal, to building a distributed home temperature monitoring system with Raspberry Pis, I've spent a good deal of time testing the limits of an SBC, and also finding ways…
Dmitry.GR: Interactive-speed Linux on a tiny board you can easily build with only 3 8-pin chips
Another explainer on a fun, esoteric topic: optimizing code with SIMD (single instruction multiple data, also sometimes called vectorization ). Designing a good, fast, portable SIMD algorithm is not a simple matter and requires thinking a little bit like a circuit designer.
Introduction to implementing USB devices. Minimal overview of hardware and software with an example with STM32 microcontroller. Also contains an index to very detailed guides for more information.
When building a large scale, highly available and distributed system, what architecture concepts do you need to use, in practice? In this post, I am summarizing ones I have found essential to learn and apply when building the payments system that powers Uber. This is a system with a load
Recently, I got a new laptop and had to set it up so I could start using it. But I wasn't really in the mood to go through the same old steps which I had explained in this post earlier . I was complaining about this to my colleague, and there came the suggestion of why not copy the entire disk to the new laptop…
I've used Linux containers directly and indirectly for years, but I wanted to become more familiar with them. So I wrote some code. This used to be 500 lines of code, I swear, but I've revised it some since publishing; I've ended up with about 70 lines more.
