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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
In this article I give a brief tour of a program analysis technique called symbolic execution. As the title indicates, I aim to explain both the intuition behind the technique, and also the details of a simple implementation. My intended audience is professional programmers who have no background in program analysis.
I know that a lot of people struggle with understanding the memory model introduced in C11/C++11. In a recent conversation I was alerted to the existence of this blog post, which while correct (by …
Published: 28-01-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
What is QUIC protocol and how does it work ?
Thoughts on how compiler and database optimizers should evolve in the future, focusing on predictability and guarantees instead of smarts and heroics
Originally drafted as a thread on hackers.town , after Abbie Normal asked me to expand on a side comment in a discussion of documentation .
When your software team needs to pick a language today, you typically weigh two factors: language performance and developer velocity.
I’ve enjoyed writing software for 40+ years now. Lots of activities fall into that “writing software” basket, and here’s my favorite: When you have a body of code with a decent unit-test suite and you need to make it go faster. This part of the Quamina diary is a case study of making a piece of the library faster.
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…
In P of EAA I said "don't distribute your objects". Does this advice contradict my interest in Microservices?
Quick and easy guide for securing macOS systems, for both laymen and security enthusiasts. Last updated for Golden Gate.
In this blog post, you will learn different methods to harden your OpenBSD system, and in which situation they are useful
This is the third post in the article series about Unix and Linux utilities that you should know about. In this post I will take you through the useful lsof tool. If netcat was called the Swiss Army Knife of Network Connections, then I'd call lsof the Swiss Army Knife of Unix debugging. Lsof follows Unix philosophy...
Lock-free programming is a challenge, not just because of the complexity of the task itself, but because of how difficult it can be to penetrate the subject in the first place. I …
Is this feasible? Yes it is! OpenZFS on Linux compiled from sources for RISC-V, it will work with less than 250MB of RAM for a nearly fully filled 2TB zfs volume with 225.000 files! Even stressing the system and run in parallel (via Wifi): a…
I’m serious about shell startup speed. I use tmux to open and close tmux splits all day every day, so I need zsh to start quickly. I used to use frameworks like oh-my-zsh or prezto and while I was happy with the functionality they provided I wasn’t happy with their impact on my shell’s startup speed. So, what do we do…
Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs? The goal of this post is to convince you that this is suboptimal, and walk you through a better approach.
It's time to put my water cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster to the test. I put it up against my MacBook and a Windows PC to see which performed best
There is an odd bug in Windows related to Video CDs . To reproduce it: Insert a Video CD (if you don't have one, you can download this fi...
This post is a slightly edited version of my November presentation to the San Francisco chapter of Papers We Love.
How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons:
Windows paths have been WTF-16 -encoded for decades, but module names in the import tables of Portable Executable are octets. If a name contains values beyond ASCII — technically out of spec — then the dynamic linker must somehow decode those octets into Unicode in order to construct a lookup path. There are multiple…
We’ve been lied to. They keep showing us charts where CPU speed goes up and up every year as if Moore’s Law isn’t just a historical observation but some kind of divine right. Without lifting a finger, we software folks watch our programs magically accelerate just by virtue of new hardware.
An algorithmic complexity attack is a denial of service attack that triggers worst case behaviour in code that is otherwise expected to perform well. The canonical example would be the widely published attacks against hash table implementations , where carefully crafted inputs made snappy \(O(1)\) operations…
While investigating the aftermath of a potential security breach, I came across a somewhat "odd" process looking like this:
This post is meant to guide you through some of the lessons I’ve learned while working with multi-terabyte datasets. The lessons shared are focused on what someone may face as the size of the…
