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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 85 posts.
About a month ago I moved to Stockholm, Sweden and started working at Spotify . A month before starting I was asked about my preferred setup for working. Having used OS X for year as the primary operating system at work the choice was clear, I wanted to go back to Linux, in this case to Debian to be exact.
Preface This is a technical article chronicling one of the most interesting bug hunts I’ve had the pleasure of chasing down. At AdGear Technologies Inc. where I work, ssh is king. We use it for management, monitoring, deployments, log file harvesting, even some event streaming. It’s solid, reliable, has all the…
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
I don’t like stupid benchmarks, as they waste my time. I don’t like stupid marketing, as it wastes my time too. Sometimes I succumb to those things, and now in return I want to waste yo…
XScreenSaver 5.15 is out now. Along with the usual set of minor improvements, this version runs as an iOS application. As all of the 3D modules in XScreenSaver are written against the OpenGL 1.3 specification, and as the iPhone only supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and newer, this was something of a big deal. I accomplished…
Update Dec 20, 2012 : Apple appears to have fixed this in a way by adding a “Keep changes in original document” checkbox in the save dialog. Bandaids are better than nothing. It is also possible to add a keyboard shortcut for Save As, which is partially hidden (option key).
This is an introductory overview post for the Linux Graphics Stack, and how it currently all fits together. I initially wrote it for myself after having conversations with people like Owen Taylor, Ray Strode and Adam Jackson about this stack. I had to go back to them every month or so and learn the stuff from the…
Measure frame time, allocations, overdraw, and repeated work before changing code; the useful optimization is the one a trace can prove.
Remember when I blogged about linear read scalability out to 32 cores ? Well, the awesome Nate Boley provided me with access to his brand n...
The previous post described [motherboards and the memory map] memory-map in Intel computers to set the scene for the initial phases of boot. Booting is an involved, hacky, multi-stage affair - fun st
On this blog, I’ve been rambling on about lock-free programming subjects such as acquire and release semantics and weakly-ordered CPUs. I’ve tried to make these …
Updated (February 07 2013): If you enjoy this article, you may also find the more academically-inclined article The Impact of Meta-Tracing on VM Design and Implementation interesting.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Last year, I bought my 87-year-old grandfather an iPad 2 to replace the who-knows-what PC that was frustrating him constantly. He only used the PC for email and playing music, so it was a no-brainer.
Even though MP3 is probably the single most well known file format and codec on Earth, it’s not very well understood by most programmers – for many encoders/decoders is in the class of software “other people” write, like standard libraries or operating system kernels. This article will attempt to demystify the…
