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BGP in a Nutshell
PhD student at University of Texas at Austin 🤘. Doing systems for ML.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,390 posts.
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Serverless computing: one step forward, two steps back
Serverless computing: one step forward, two steps back Hellerstein et al., CIDR’19 The biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research has come round again. Today’s paper choice is su…
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Load-Store Conflicts
meshoptimizer implements several geometry compression algorithms that are designed to take advantage of redundancies common in mesh data and decompress quickly - targeting many gigabytes per second in decoding throughput. One of them, index decoder, has seen a significant and unexpected variance in performance across…
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Systemd can be a cause of restrictions on daemons
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Exposing the Wayland lie (2018)
Hi, people of the future! Did you know that I wrote a follow-up article to this one, called “Further Thoughts on Wayland”? This original article was written in a more combative tone tha…
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Building a fast all-SSD NAS on a budget
I edit videos non-stop nowadays. In a former life, I had a 2 TB backup volume and that stored my entire digital life—all my photos, family video clips, and every bit of code and text I'd ever written. Video is a different beast, entirely. Every minute of 4K ProRes LT footage (which is a very lightweight format…
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A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux (1999)
If you're a programmer who's become fed up with software bloat, then may you find herein the perfect antidote.
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Whatever happened to QuickTime?
QuickTime ruled from 1991-2019, and was bigger than Apple itself. But can you name what replaced it, and whether it works as well?
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I Cannot SSH into My Server Anymore (and That's Fine)
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.
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15k inserts/s with Rust and SQLite (2021)
There is this growing sentiment in tech that stacking more and more layers of complexity to reach the sacrosanct "infinite scalability" is not the way forward. First, because it rarely materializes: you need a lot of other things than fancy tech to reach millions of people. Second, because the tradeoffs
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What security does a default OpenBSD installation offer?
In this text I will explain what makes OpenBSD secure by default when you install it. Do not take this for a security analysis, but more like a guide to help you understand what is done by OpenBSD to have a secure environment. The purpose of this text is not to compare OpenBSD to other OSes but to say what you can…
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Ambitions for a Unix Shell
As discussed in the January blog roadmap , I want to concretely describe a reduced Oil language , and see if we can get it "done" in 2020.
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On Running systemd-nspawn Containers (2022)
I’d like to talk more about a container technology that I really like that I touched upon in a previous article : systemd-nspawn .
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FreeBSD 13.2 on ThinkPad T14 (GEN1)
I used to run FreeBSD on older laptops – some more then a decade old – like my favorite ThinkPad W520 daily driver or ThinkPad X220 mobile companion. Today I will share with you my expe…
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The Musl Preprocessor Debate
Today, I would like to discuss a project that I care very deeply about: the musl libc. One of the most controversial and long-standing debates in the musl community is that musl does not define a p…
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Go’s runtime C to Go rewrite, by the numbers
The start of September brings a close to the Go 1.4 merge window . From now until the release in December, only bug fixes and tweaks will be accepted.
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Conditions in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip's microcode
In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor ...
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HTTPS' massive speed advantage
I tweeted this the other day, and the internet was not pleased: > HTTPS is slow. No - wait - is it HTTP that's slow?! https://t.co/T49GG7oCaK pic.twitter.com/cfnYOpXMWc [https://t.co/cfnYOpXMWc] — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 8, 2016 [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/751317949349130240] In fact, a
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When code is suspiciously fast: adventures in dead code elimination
Part of a recent assignment for one of my classes involved calculating the Fibonacci sequence both recursively and iteratively and measuring the speed of each method. (BONUS: For a fun diversion, here is a paper I wrote about using the Golden Ratio, which is closely related to the Fibonacci sequence, as a base for a…
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Implementing WebGPU in Gecko
As WebGPU specification is approaching a usable shape, we are working on prototype implementations in both Gecko and Servo. If you ever wondered about what i...
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Building a 64-bit aarch64 kernel and userspace for the Raspberry Pi 4
I’ve recently been tinkering around with using a Raspberry Pi as a desktop computer. The Pi 4 is fairly powerful; very sufficient for web browsing, audio, video, and terminal use for programming.
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Avoiding Instruction Cache Misses
Excessive instruction cache misses are the kind of a performance problem that's going to appear only in larger codebases. In this article, I'm describing some ideas on how to deal with this issue.
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Bits on the Wire
Exactly 100% of everything on the Internet involves exchanging messages which represent items of interest to humans. These items can be classified into three baskets: One for “media” (images, sound, video), one for text (HTML, PDF, XML), and one for “objects” (chat messages, payments, love poems, order statuses). This…