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A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
Building a fully functional Linux handheld computer for under $15, featuring a custom PCB design, minimal BOM cost, and practical usability
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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Command-line tools can be faster than your Hadoop cluster
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
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Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
[Jan 26, 7:25am]: Google has responded to this article and the plans for throttling: Unfortunately, our current implementation throttles...
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Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases
What I've learned from ten years working on projects like this
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Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3
Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
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Jemalloc Postmortem
The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and hasbeen in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing,jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to anend. This post briefly desc...
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Investigating why Steam started picking a random font
Out of the blue my Steam started picking a random font I had in my user fonts dir: Virgil , the Excalidraw font.
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The session you cannot take with you
Inference APIs are filling sessions with encrypted reasoning, hidden search results, opaque compaction, and encrypted subagent messages. A growing form of lock-in.
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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
By examining the limits of reasonable user behavior and embracing imperfection for users who go beyond it, we can continue to provide service that meets the expectations of users without sacrificing scalability of the system.
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ARM64 Linux Workstation
My personal website and blog
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Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
In this post I’ll attempt the fun stunt of designing a system that could serve the full production load of Twitter with most of the features intact on a single (very powerful) machine. I’ll start by showing off a Rust prototype of the core tweet distribution data structure handling 35x full load by fitting the hot set…
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I helped fix sleep-wake hangs on Linux with AMD GPUs
Adventures in programming, hardware, DSP, and chiptune
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UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
Programming with dates, times, and timezones is hard. But here's some help.
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Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud Kleppmann et al., Onward! ’19 Watch out! If you start reading this paper you could be lost for hours following all the interesti…
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Keyboard latency
If you look at “gaming" keyboards, a lot of them sell for $100 or more on the promise that they’re fast. Ad copy that you’ll see includes:
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Maestro: A Linux-compatible kernel in Rust
Maestro is a Unix-like kernel and operating system written from scratch in Rust
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A 10 year old Xeon is all you need
Or running Gemma 4 on a 2016 Xeon with no GPU, 25 flags, 128 GB of DDR3, and a 25B-parameter MoE.
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“Clean” code, horrible performance
Many programming "best practices" taught today are performance disasters waiting to happen.
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A Linux Evening
I love to have Linux as my main OS. For someone who spends most of his time programming, writing HTML, writing LaTeX, and browsing the net, it is nearly a perfect tool. Packages are one "apt install" away. Mounting my website is one sshfs away and with private key authentication I don't even have to type my password…
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Your CPU may have slowed down on Wednesday
The death of hardware store optimization.
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Fixing stutters in Papers Please on Linux
Since I switched to Linux some time ago, I had my fair share of problems with running games on Linux. To be fair, most of these were not designed to run on linux, but the awesome Proton and its main project wine make it easy to run most games I am interested in seamlessly. Most of the time when problems arise, games…
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Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs
Design differences of containers, Zones, Jails and VMs.
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Why PS4 downloads are so slow
PS4 downloads have a reputation of being very slow. I did some digging to find out the root cause, and was surprised.
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This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
Ethical Hacking and Cybersecurity Blog
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DNS Esoterica – Why you can't dig Switzerland
As part of my new job, I'm learning a lot more about the mysteries of the Domain Name System than any mortal should know I thought possible. The humble unix dig command allows you to query all sort of DNS information. For example, to see name server records for the BBC website, you can run: dig bbc.co.uk NS Which will…