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Shells are two things
Command languages and scripting languages are and should be different things.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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Austral: A systems language with linear types and capabilities
Introducing a new programming language.
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ECC RAM should be a human right
I am now a staunch advocate for ECC RAM, after the events of last week. You see, over the last several weeks my main desktop workstation has been misbehaving, with occasional freezing and crashing. After some diagnostics I began to suspect a faulty RAM module, and sure enough, upon performing a quick run of memtest86…
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Formal Methods: Just Good Engineering Practice? (2024)
Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 ( watch the video or check out the slides ). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice. If you’re a software engineer, especially one working on…
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Linux Certificate Authority root stores have a too simple view of 'trust'
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, a chip to "separate the really power-hungry folks from ordinary mortals." The origin...
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How Compaction Works in Pi
Why compaction is needed for large language models and how Pi implements it
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PostgreSQL, Memory and the Cloud
This post explains how Linux memory overcommit and OOM-killer behavior can turn a single runaway query into a full PostgreSQL crash, and why many managed cloud database services fail to disable overcommit the way self-hosted PostgreSQL recommends.
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Cache Associativity
Consider a strided incrementing loop over an array of size $N=2^{21}$ with a fixed step size of 256:
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Let's Build a 28-Core Raspberry Pi Cluster
I built a 28-core gigabit cluster, Kraken, consisting of 7 Raspberry Pi 3 Model Bs.
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Some Notes About Time
This is a trade-off: you can't represent a leap second, and your time is guaranteed to go backwards. On the other hand, every day has exactly 86,400 seconds, and you don't need a table of all previous and future leap seconds in order to format Unix time as human-preferred hours-minutes-seconds.
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Fast base64 encoding and decoding
Computers store data as streams of bits. Binary files like image, audio or video files are allowed to contain just about any sequence of bits. However, we also often use text formats; for example, web pages and emails are required to be text. So how do we send images by email? How do we embed … Continue reading…
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The LMAX Architecture - 100K TPS at Less than 1ms Latency
LMAX is a retail financial trading system that can handle that can 6 million orders per second on a single JVM thread. The business logic runs in-memory surrounded by disruptors using event sourcing.
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Writing a Unix Shell – Part II
Building your own UNIX shell in parts. This post explains how to execute commands.
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Depressing and faintly terrifying days for the C standard [pdf]
Chris Lattner, the architect of the Clang/LLVM C compiler explained the effects of the C standard’s “undefined behavior”(UB):
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The Ubuntu 26.04 Rust sudo is not compatible with standard sudo
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Optimizations Enabled by -ffast-Math
This blog post describes the optimizations enabled by -ffast-math when compiling C or C++ code with GCC 11 for x86_64 Linux (other languages/operating systems/CPU architectures may enable slightly different optimizations).
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The G in GPU is for Graphics damnit
As is true for everything, a lot of things need to happen for anything to happen, and so it’s true for this blogpost as well. Out of all of these everything that needed to happen, 3 are these:
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Amiga Systems Programming in 2023
If you ever get a chance to look through the classic Amiga OS source-code still floating around some murky corners of the internet, it is a thing of beauty and astonishing capabilities. It’s an inspirational piece of computing history with unmatched capabilities for the time. Remember, this was all on a computer…
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Reviving the 1973 Unix Programmer's Manual
The 1973 Fourth Edition of the Unix Programmer’s Manual doesn’t seem to be available online in typeset form. This is how I managed to recreate it from its source code.