Topics /
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
Recently I came across two great articles on the Pusher blog: Low latency, large working set, and GHC’s garbage collector: pick two of three and Golang’s Real-time GC in Theory and Practice . The articles tell the story of how Pusher engineers reimplemented their message bus. The first take was done in Haskell. During…
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
In January 2017, we presented results to the European Commission on a FP7project called SyncFree, where we were tasked with a large-scale evaluationof the Lasp programming system. In this evaluatio...
A transcript of the talk I given in 2018 about the state of embedded programming in Rust.
Recently I've been playing around with FreeBSD in a virtual machine. The reason for this is that (if all goes well) some time in December my new Framework laptop will arrive, replacing my current X1 Carbon that is starting to show signs of old age (e.g. a keyboard where certain keys don't always work). Framework in…
AdamW on Linux and more
A retrospective on a few months of working on a graduate degree in computer science.
Though most relational databases (like MySQL) are "row oriented", in that they keep rows stored together... experience has taught us that pivoting the data arrow so that columns, and not rows, are stored together can be beneficial. This is an old observation that most experienced programmers know about as the…
Launched in 1998, the 380Z was one very fine ThinkPad. It was the last ThinkPad to come in the classic bulky and rectangular form factor. It was also one of the first to feature a huge 13.3" TFT display, powerful 233MHz Pentium II, and whopping 160 megs of RAM.
In distributed systems, one of the fundamental challenges is knowing whether a node or service is alive and functioning properly. Unlike monolithic applications, where everything runs in a single process, distributed systems span multiple machines, networks, and data centers. This becomes even glaring when the nodes…
Modern hard drives store an incredible amount of data in a small space, and are still the default choice for high-capacity (though not highest-performance) storage. While hard drives have been around since the 1950s, the current 3.5″ form factor (actually 4″ wide) appeared in the early 1980s. Since then, the capacity…
Previously , I installed Linux on a small ARM Chromebook and set it up without X.Org, using only the console. After neglecting that machine for quite some time, I came back to it because I wanted to try some pixel-graphics programming and the framebuffer seemed like it might be an easy target.
End-to-end documentation of a journey from no PCB experience to fabricating my own Linux-ready system that can boot the latest mainline kernel. This article is the recommended reading for someone building their first embedded Linux board. F1C100s SoC is used for this sample board.
An "amateur hour" Javascript bug is self-DDOSing Twitter, sending infinite requests from users related to — or possibly even causing — Elon Musk's "temporary emergency measures" to stop web scraping.
Microsoft is increasingly standardizing on its in-house CBL-Mariner Linux distribution. Is this Microsoft Linux?
Two systems I know pretty well, Apache BookKeeper and Apache Kafka, were designed in the era of the spinning disk, the hard-drive or HDD. Hard-drives are good at sequential IO but not so good at random IO because of the relatively high seek times. No wonder then that both Kafka and BookKeeper were d
The system memory allocator free operation zeroes out all deallocated blocks in iOS 16.1 beta or later. Invalid accesses to free memory might result in new crashes or corruption, including NULL -pointer dereferences and non-zero memory being returned from calloc .
I’m more surprised by the nature of many of these issues, by how ridiculous they are compared with the sheer age and supposed maturity of a 20+ year-old operating system.
A programming blog written by Vaxry.
It’s surprisingly hard to give a good answer (the question was raised in this article). It depends on how you count, and the details are interesting (to me anyway). To not leave you hanging: …
Years ago, I maintained a big C++ codebase at my day job. This product was the bread winner for the company and offered a public HTTP API for online payments. We are talking billions of euros of processed payments a year.
Jetstream is a streaming service that consumes an AT Proto Sync Firehose and converts it into lightweight, filterable, friendly JSON, allowing us to live tail all posts on Bluesky for as little as ~850 MB/day
