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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 340 posts.
We are an exploratory species, just past the solar system now, but perhaps one day we will look back and call our galaxy merely the first. There are many problems to solve along the way, and today we will look at one very small one. How do we assign IDs to devices (or any object) so the IDs are guaranteed to always be…
What comes to mind when you hear "frontend optimization"? For most of us it's things like reducing network requests, shrinking the bundle,…
My old 2016 MacBook Pro has been collecting dust in a cabinet for some time now. The laptop suffers from a “flexgate” problem, and I don’t have any practical use for it. For quite some time, I’ve been thinking about repurposing it as a guinea pig, to play with FreeBSD — an OS that I’d aspired to play with for a long…
Claude Code has gotten extremely good at finding security vulnerabilities, and this is only the beginning.
I’ve been a self-employed contractor for about a decade now, and I’m bummed about Harvest .
Creative ideas for speeding up queries in PostgreSQL
Personal website of Cody Ho
A basic introduction to USB for people that don't need to know what happens on the wire
I built a device to measure end-to-end input latency, then used it to find out what actually moves the needle.
Thinking through how the conventional OSS security embargoes no longer buy us time, and what open source maintainers might do instead to respond
JPEG is a clever image compression algorithm that exploits a human perceptual bias and the structure of natural images. It makes a change of basis before encoding so that the rewritten image representation concentrates the signal that humans are most perceptive to, and thus, the remaining details can be discarded…
Dmitry.GR: I am often asked to explain my distaste for RISC-V. Here it is.
A cron job for every man, woman, and child.
In September 2014 I published a short post announcing rqlite. The idea was simple: take SQLite, put a Raft log in front of it, and replicate every write to a cluster so that the loss of a node did not mean the loss of the data. The source went on GitHub that same weekend. As…
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on design issues in LLVM IR . Since then, one of these issues has been fixed fully (opaque pointers migration), one has been mostly fixed (constant expression removal), and one is well on the way towards being fixed (ptradd migration).
Andy Warfield writes about the hard-won lessons dealing with data friction that lead to S3 Files
In this article I will introduce a new command line search tool, ripgrep , that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw performance of GNU grep. ripgrep is fast, cross platform (with binaries available for Linux, Mac and Windows) and written in Rust .
After a decade on Ubuntu 16.04, I migrated my blog to FreeBSD on Hetzner. Some notes on setting up a VPS with FreeBSD, Jails, Bastille, Caddy reverse proxies, and load testing and benchmarking the blog from four continents.
My TP-Link EAP770 v1 corrupts downloads over Wi-Fi and TP-Link EOL'd it before I unboxed it. The fix is two zeros in sysfs. TP-Link's shell won't let me write them, so I wrote a kernel exploit for my own fucking access point.
cybersecurity, tech, and personal annoyance log
One of the surprising (at least to me) consequences of the fall of Twitter is the rise of LinkedIn as a social media site. I saw some interesting posts I wanted to call attention to: First, Simon W…
Happy New Year, and Welcome to Gas Town!
A selected list of timeless and influential papers in distributed systems that shaped the research in the field. Intended to serve as a good…
Where are they now? You won't believe her new look!
Python loses every public benchmark by 21-875x. I took the exact problems people use to dunk on Python and climbed every rung of the optimization ladder -- from CPython version upgrades to Rust. Real numbers, real code, real effort costs.
NOTE June 2026: Hetzner announced over 100% increases in prices. They will honour old prices for instances built before June 15th 2026, but for new instances the performance/price ratios show below are no longer valid.
If you need a basic NAS and don't care about GUI features, it is suprisingly simple to set up a ZFS dataset and share it over the network using Samba.
Traditional Wayland compositors have a monolithic architecture that combines the compositor and window manager into a single program. This has the downside of requiring Wayland window managers to do the significant work of implementing an entire Wayland compositor as well.
