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macOS to FreeBSD migration a.k.a. why I left macOS
This is not a technical documentation for how I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD. This is a high-level for why I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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RabbitMQ vs. Kafka – An Architect’s Dilemma (Part 1)
RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka might appear similar but serve very different needs. Read to learn and make an informed decision suitable for your needs.
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A Simple ELF
The Ivory Tower is a blog about software engineering and development philosophy by Anders Sundman.
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Avoiding Complexity with Systemd
Using systemd to avoid having to write some risky code
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Why Const Doesn't Make C Code Faster
In a post a few months back I said it’s a popular myth that const is helpful for enabling compiler optimisations in C and C++ . I figured I should explain that one, especially because I used to believe it was obviously true, myself. I’ll start off with some theory and artificial examples, then I’ll do some experiments…
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You need to be able to run your system
"Run the unit tests" doesn't count. The complexity of your system is in the interactions between the units.
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Python is Actually Portable
Gautham's Blog
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Even if you can't write assembly, you can read disassembly
This is a very concise introduction to x86 disassembly. It shows that you probably have all the skills to start reading disassembly right now even if you thought it was too complicated for you. It really isn't, see it for yourself.
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Landlock-Ing Linux
Landlock is a Linux API that lets applications explicitly declare which resources they are allowed to access. Its philosophy is similar to OpenBSD’s unveil() and (less so) pledge() : programs can make a contract with the kernel stating, “I only need these files or resources — deny me everything else if I’m…
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Wddbfs – Mount a SQLite database as a filesystem
Often when I’m prototyping a project, I hesitate to use a sqlite database despite their many adavantages . It seems much easier to just dump a bunch of files in a directory and to rely on the universal support for the filesystem API to read/delete/update records. Part of this is avoiding the overhead of figuring out a…
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Writing a register based VM in less than 125 lines of C code
This tutorial is intended for intermediate C developers who want to get some coding practice and, in the process, gain valuable insights into low-level programming and how (some) Virtual Machines operate under the hood. The reader should already be comfortable with bitwise operations, hexadecimal notation, pointers…
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Systemd by Example (2021)
The first article in a series where I explore aspects of systemd by creating small examples with the help of containers.
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Finding the “second bug” in glibc’s condition variable
I continue to have no time for big programming projects, so here is a short blog post. Two years ago I looked into a bug in the glibc implementation of condition variables: Sometimes pthread_cond_s…
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No More Full Table Vacuums in PostgreSQL
I just committed a very important patch to PostgreSQL. The short summary for the patch is " Don't vacuum all-frozen pages. " and it follows...
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The cult of dd (2017)
You'll often see instructions for creating and using disk images on Unix systems making use of the dd command. This is a strange program of [obscure provenance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)) that somehow, still manages to survive in the 21st century.
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Desktop Linux Hardening (2022)
Linux is not a secure desktop operating system. However, there are steps you can take to harden it, reduce its attack surface, and improve its privacy. Before we start… Some of the sections will include mentions of unofficial builds of packages like linux‑hardened, akmod, hardened_malloc, and so on. These are not…
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Apple has stopped providing standalone installers for macOS updates
Apple released macOS Big Sur 11.1 on 14 December. Although yesterday it finally posted standalone installers for the two concomitant security updates to Catalina and Mojave, no standalone updaters …
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My experience with NixOS
In a nutshell, NixOS is a operating system based on Linux that provides a declarative package and configuration management.
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Io uring
Introduced in 2019 (kernel 5.1) by Jens Axboe, io_uring (henceforth uring) is a system for providing the kernel with a schedule of system calls, and receiving the results as they're generated. Whereas epoll and kqueue support multiplexing, where you're told when you can usefully perform a system call using some set of…
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Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account
Arch Linux ARM on the ASUS ProArt P16, with a bootable installer, published Windows comparisons, and local Qwen inference.
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PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support
As of last nightly (20181115100051), Firefox now supports Wayland on Linux, thanks to the work from Martin Stransky and Jan Horak, mostly.
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Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus