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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 380 posts.
Perhaps the most often repeated complaint about Rust is its slow feedback loop and long compilation times. I hear about it all the time; in Rust podcasts, blog posts, surveys, conference talks or offline discussions. I also regularly complain about it, being a Rust user myself!
Over the last decade, we’ve seen great advancements in distributed systems, but the way we program them has seen few fundamental improvements. While we can sometimes abstract away distribution (Spark, Redis, etc.), developers still struggle with challenges like concurrency, fault tolerance, and versioning. There are…
Why does Space Station 14 crash with ANGLE on ARM64? 6 hours later…
Ever since I got AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question: What's the point? The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That's not much. Especially considering a modern desktop has at least one slot with 16 lanes of…
This is an effort to create a fully functional Kubernetes cluster with 1 million active nodes.
Update on 2025-07-28: added note about Debian 13/trixie support for OpenVox (thanks, Ben Ford!)
How Mac applications evolved from a multitude of resources to a bundle formed from a standard layout of directories, and how they have come to be largely self-contained in macOS 26.
First released with Zstandard 1.3.2 in 2017, the --long range match finder increases the compressor’s search window to at least 128MiB, improving deduplication inside large files. This optional feature had substantial performance overheads at launch, but various optimisations have since brought its performance within…
Several years ago, I spent a serious chunk of time figuring out how to make really teensy ELF executable files. I started down this path because I was annoyed that all of my programs, no matter how short they were, never got smaller than 4k or so. I felt that was excessive, for C, and so I started looking at what ELF…
This week-end project started by browsing the open-data repository of Paris’ public transport network, which contains various APIs to query real-time departures, current disruptions, etc.The data reuse section caught my eye, as it features external projects that use this open data.In particular, the RATP status…
We learn why adding on x86 isn't as obvious as you might think
Most books and courses introduce Linux through shell commands, leaving the kernel as a mysterious black box doing magic behind the scenes. In this post, we will run some experiments to demystify it: the Linux kernel is just a binary that you can build and run.
In the past few years, CPUs have gotten really fast. Shockingly fast! Yet most people are stuck on previous generation mobile chips (whether by choice, or by their companies choice), at a huge detriment to their productivity. Meanwhile, AI coding subscriptions like Cursor are all the rage these days. I'll skip the…
The other day, while wasting time reading reddit, I stumbled upon a blogpost mentioning S3 FIFO, a method claiming to outperform LRU (Least Recently Used) in terms of cache miss ratio. Notable companies like RedPandas, Rising Wave, and Cloudflare have already implemented it in various capacities, so this piqued my…
Software Engineer
Pattern recognition can see through obfuscated code to find the right instruction
I bought a MacBook Air M2. As of writing, it's very affordable with the 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 13.6" model available for $750. As of writing, also Asahi Linux doesn't support anything newer than M2.
Configuring PipeWire to make laptop speakers sound better (Bankstown, Convolution/FIR, etc.)
Using a decommissioned Alibaba cloud accelerator card as an FPGA dev board
How dare you!
The last few days I spent some time digging into the recently announced KIP-1150 ("Diskless Kafka"), as well AutoMQ’s Kafka fork, tightly integrating Apache Kafka and object storage, such as S3. …
So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2…
How do you fit a dictionary in 64kb RAM? Unix engineers solved it with clever data structures and compression tricks. Here's the fascinating story behind it.
Programming notes for Unreal Engine, Houdini, Game Development, Math, & Graphics
