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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 263 posts.
The Huawei MateBook X is a high-quality 13" ultra-thin laptop with a fanless Core i5 processor. It is obviously biting the design of the Apple 12" MacBook , but it does have some notable improvements such as a slightly larger screen, a more usable keyboard with adequate key travel, and 2 USB-C ports.
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
In this post I will talk about some tools that can help us solve a painful problem in Python, especially when using PyPy: memory consumption. Why are we concerned with this in the first place? Why …
unless you click View > Show All Devices, quit Disk Utility, then relaunch it (thanks to xenadu02 for the workaround !)
In this article, I will describe steps needed to start on with development of real UEFI applications on x86 PC, and share some practical experiences with problems doing so. I will focus on 64-bit version of UEFI, because the 32-bit version isn't much used in this area (most likely due to Microsoft decision not to…
…wherein I talk about my latest Z80 emulation adventures.
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
In a previous blog post we discussed a brief history of the select(2) syscall . The article concludes that some I/O multiplexing was necessary to do console emulation, games and non-trivial TCP/IP applications.
This week, I’ve been working on an application that sets up IPsec connections. PF_KEYv2 is the standard interface for configuring IPsec. PF_KEYv2 is widely-available; even systems with more advanced IPsec stacks (like XFRM on Linux) provide a PF_KEYv2-compatible wrapper. I want my application to work on OS X and…
Building a robust background worker system that leverages transactional isolation to never work a job too early, and transactional durability to never let one drop.
If you asked software engineers some of their “least hated” things, you’ll likely hear both UTF-8 and TCP. TCP, despite being 35 years old, is rock-solid, stable infrastructure that we take for granted today; it’s hard to sometimes realize that TCP was man-made, given how well it’s served us. But within every single…
In this article you'll see how to run a PDP-11 simulator through Docker to interact with Unix as it was back in 1972.
Native development on a Chromebook, with Chrome OS in Developer Mode
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…
A month ago, danluu wrote about [terminal and shell performance](https://danluu.com/term-latency/). In that post, he measured the latency between a key being pressed and the corresponding character appearing in the terminal. Across terminals, median latencies ranged between 5 and 45 milliseconds, with the 99.9th…
Sebastian Krahmer of the SUSE Security Team has discovered a local root exploit in systemd v228 . A local user on a system running systemd v228 can escalate to root privileges. That's bad.
[ I wrote this post in mid-2014 for debuggers.co, which seems to have gone at least partly defunct, so I am reproducing it here. That site collected answers from programmers to the prompt “What’s the most interesting bug you’ve encountered?” ]
Whilst writing a previous blog post I stumbled across the .NET Interpreter, tucked away in the source code. Although, it I’d made even the smallest amount of effort to look for it, I’d have easily found it via the GitHub ‘magic’ file search:
Traceroute can points to a link having terrible latency, but despite what it appears, it's easy to misread the output and jump to the wrong conclusion.
It seems that every day, some computer monkey comes up with a new and more groovy serialization protocol. In the beginning, there was ASN.1 and XDR, and it was good. I think ASN.1 came first, and l…
Tokio is a Rust framework for developing applications which perform asynchronous I/O — an event-driven approach that can often achieve better …
Edit 2017/12/10: So I screwed up, I thought I was safe confirming it in two different ways but I was using an external monitor and all of the below is accurate only for a specific multi-monitor case. Skip to the bottom to read about my new results.
The common way of deleting files and folders in Windows is via Windows Explorer (a.k.a. File Explorer ). This method is perfectly acceptable under normal circumstances, but becomes a real drag when dealing with large and complex folder structures. There is, in fact, a significant amount of of overhead when you trigger…
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
