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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 340 posts.
I was pleasantly surprised and happy to see that my article ‘Your executable is a SQLite database’ resonated with people. It is a format I have been thinking about for a while, and the idea seems to have struck a chord with others.
Last week we released version 0.2 of pgrust. This release was all about performance. It’s 10x faster than the previous version of pgrust. On OLTP benchmarks, pgrust is 30% faster than Postgres, and on Clickbench, Clickhouse’s benchmark for analytical databases, pgrust is 300x faster than Postgres. It’s even ahead of…
What we lose when we no longer have to learn how our computers work.
Wayland has been a broad misdirection and misallocation of time and developer resources at the expense of users. With more migration from other operating systems, the pressure to fix fundamental problems has become more prominent. After 17 years of development, now is a good time to reflect on some of the larger…
Wayland is the successor to the X server (X11, Xorg) to implement the graphics stack on Linux. The Wayland project was actually started in 2008, a year before I created the i3 tiling window manager for X11 in 2009 — but for the last 18 years (!), Wayland was never usable on my computers. I don’t want to be stuck on…
Although I have to have a machine running macOS Tahoe to support our customers, I personally don't like the look of Liquid Glass, nor do I like some of the functional changes Apple has made in macOS Tahoe.
143 vs 36 minutes is far too big difference
A post from David Gerard reminded me why I still use Xfce almost everywhere.
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
a digital garden by daniel phiri
Internet Archive Staff Bruce Li introduces his The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting thus: Thi...
Exploring how to measure code sloppiness, why correct code can still erode a codebase, and why human intuition and taste still matter.
Tracing one vector-add kernel from nvcc all the way down to the warps that execute it.
Why a filter is slowest when it keeps half of random input, and what a branchless rewrite gains there and loses at 1%.
Arch Linux ARM on the ASUS ProArt P16, with a bootable installer, published Windows comparisons, and local Qwen inference.
My last post on the Rust compiler’s performance was two months ago and a lot has happened since then.
I have spent a large portion of my career working in Java. In that time, you get used to huge classes. New functionality? Just add a new method and field to the class. The cost of each new field is rarely considered. Performance is often considered from a classic computer science perspective by considering asymptotic…
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned about recently is the engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Here are the key requirements it’s designed to meet: Store …
Latest Geekbench performance figures for macOS VMs, and testing of how few cores and how little memory is really needed: could you run a macOS VM usefully on a MacBook Neo?
I found this tiny fanless Thunderbolt 25G Ethernet adapter. With a little tinkering, it actually works.
This blog post goes into quite some detail about how I first booted Linux on my M4 Mac mini. I encourage you to look up terms and concepts you don’t know, since I cannot explain all the background in this post ;)
We are under warning that macOS 27 is likely to remove support for AFP, and lately some additional requirements for connection to certain servers. This explains how these could affect you.
zeroserve is a small, fast, zero-config HTTPS server. You hand it a tarball of a website and it serves it - over HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, with hot reload and a tiny resident footprint. The twist is that you can drop eBPF programs into the tarball and they run on every request, in userspace, as sandboxed middleware …
Apple silicon architecture is designed to get background processes out of the way of our apps running in the foreground, by using the E cores.
Broadcom pulled public VMware VDDK downloads, creating new challenges for customers migrating to Azure, Nutanix, OpenShift, KVM, and other platforms.
Sorry for the clickbait title. I promise this post delivers: 44100 Hz stereo with near-Opus bitrates using about 4% of the N64’s CPU time.
If you happen to find yourself in a sysadmin position, or a position where you just so happen to maintain someone’s infrastructure , chances are that at some point in time the topic “we need a cache” comes up.
Recently Ben Hoyt published a blog post claiming that contrary to popular belief, I/O is not the bottleneck in typical programming interview problems such as counting word frequencies from a stream. Sequential read speed has come a long way, while CPU speed has stagnated.
In a quest to reduce the number of processes running in macOS Tahoe, consider the example of Time Machine backups, which can easily be replaced by 3rd party alternatives.
