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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 380 posts.
A very common adage in ODE solvers is that if you run into trouble with an explicit method, usually some explicit Runge-Kutta method like RK4, then you should try an implicit method. Implicit methods, because they are doing more work, solving an implicit system via a Newton method having “better” stability, should be…
If you’ve been in this trade for a while, you have probably seen dozens of debates on the merits and problems of SQL as a relational database query language. As an ORM maintainer, I have a few gripes with SQL, but overall it is workable, and anyway, it has so much inertia that there’s no point fantasizing about a…
where my words occasionally escape /dev/null
In my previous post Serving 200 million requests per day with a cgi-bin, I did some quick performance testing of CGI using a program written in Go. Go works excellently for CGI programs, for many of the same reasons it works so well for CLI programs and system daemons. But, out of curiosity, I decided to do a bit more…
UPDATE 2024-04-15: Windows Terminal 1.19 contains a fix that reduces latency by half! It’s now competitive with WSLtty on my machine. Details in the GitHub Issue.
Aviation insiders say an airworthiness directive may soon require software updates across the Airbus A320 fleet after investigators linked a JetBlue incident—where the aircraft entered a sudden uncommanded descent—to a faulty ELAC computer. Any grounding is expected to be short and staggered, with airlines updating…
Don’t waste time trying to discover which files are still open when you want to check or repair an APFS disk and Disk Utility throws an error. Here’s the solution.
On multi-core programming, not as a special-case technique, but as a new dimension in all code.
How I enabled the PowerVR GPU on the TH1520 SoC by writing the missing kernel drivers.
Because your $5 microcontroller needed to run UNIX
I spent 3 weeks earlier this year digging in to and reimplementing the lossless compression algorithm in Fuji’s RAF Camera RAW files. This post discusses the fundamentals of how it works.
So a bit under 3 years ago, I made my infamous Wayland rant post that is likely the most read post on this blog by miles. I should really actually write about music again one of these days, but that's a topic for another time. The language was perhaps a bit inflammatory, but I felt the criticisms I made at the time…
The challenge, simulate millions of particles in golang, multi-player enabled, cpu only, smart tv compatible.
The Linux kernel has a feature where you can tune the behavior of memory allocations: the vm.overcommit_memory sysctl. When overcommit is enabled (sadly, this is the default), the kernel will typically return a mapping when brk(2) or mmap(2) is called to increase a program’s heap size, regardless of whether or not…
The answer is "very often"
[New to Gemini? Have a look at my Gemini FAQ.] This article was bi-posted to Gemini and the Web; Gemini version is here: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/kraileth/neunix/2025/installing_bsd_…
Safely leverage PostgreSQL's asynchronous commit for significant performance gains
Discussion on notions of software complexity as defined by Rich Hickey, John Ousterhout and Zach Tellman.
Introduction Google has a long history of performing networking research, making changes, and pushing those changes to the entire internet. In 2011, they published one of my favorite papers, which described their decision to increase the TCP initial congestion window from 1 to 10 on their entire infrastructure. This…
setting up 20 year old hardware is bound to work first try, right? ... right?
How to Build Truly Portable eBPF Programs
I'm going to neuralyze the SPI flash and install some Kelvin Timeline firmware that will allow me to boot and install generic ARM Linux images on a ROCK 5 ITX+.
Technical blog by Stephan Berger (@malmoeb)
Notes on using the Z3 constraint solver with the Clang Static Analyzer
Eleven init systems enter, one init system leaves.
SQLite doesn’t do fsync unless specified.
Have you ever asked yourself which protocols get used when downloading pictures from the Perseverance Mars rover to Earth? I hadn’t thought about that either, until I came across an intriguing message on the internet, back in April 2024: I’m looking for someone knowledgeable of quic/quinn to help us out for our deep…
TLDR; Starting from Linux kernel version 6.9 on x86_64, there’s a new config option CONFIG_X86_FRED enabled and it adds 16 bytes to the starting point of a task’s kernel stack area, so you’ll need to account for this extra padding in your “raw” kernel stack & pt_regs lookup code. Update: It turns out that there’s a…
