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Ubuntu on Windows
Update: Here's how to get started using Ubuntu on Windows See also Scott Hanselman's blog here I'm in San Francisco this week, attendin...
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Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 250 posts.
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H.264 is Magic
A high level walkthrough of the basics of video compression techniques used in MPEG, AVC/H.264, codecs.
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Zero-cost futures in Rust
One of the key gaps in Rust’s ecosystem has been a strong story for fast and productive asynchronous I/O . We have solid foundations, like the mio library, but they’re very low level: you have to wire up state machines and juggle callbacks directly.
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Elementary OS
I’m not one prone to knee-jerk reactions, but I’m also not one to sit about idly without considering alternatives. So the first thing I did after the Apple ...
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Learning to Read X86 Assembly Language
Writing assembly language is something best left for the experts. To write code that runs directly on your microprocessor you need to know how memory segmentation works, what the intended use of each register is, how codes executes in real and protected modes and much, much more. And, of course, modern compilers will…
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Docker in Production: A History of Failure
Introduction My first encounter with docker goes back to early 2015. Docker was experimented with to find out whether it could benefit us. At the time it wasn’t possible to run a container [i…
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PostgreSQL Scalability: Towards Millions TPS
PostgreSQL scalability on multicore and multisocket machines became a subject of optimization long time ago once such machines became widely used. This blog post shows brief history of vertical scalability improvements between versions 8.0 and 8.4. PostgreSQL 9.2 had very noticeable scalability improvement. Thanks to…
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DTrace for Linux 2016
DTrace for Linux 2016: announcing a major milestone: the final kernel capabilities have merged in Linux 4.9-rc1 to enhanced BPF (eBPF) to provide an advanced programmable dynamic tracer similar to DTrace.
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BSD vs. Linux (2005)
Your browser doesn't seem to support CSS , which this page uses for all styling. Don't be surprised if it looks kinda boring.
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Xplain – Explaining X11 for the rest of us
The goal of Explanations is to try to allow people to play with fun parts of computers. Graphics, compression, audio. The tagline is my biggest inspiration: "Play, don't show", riffing off the typical "Show, don't tell" rule of writers and authors everywhere. Why bother giving a diagram when I give you an inspector…
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Kaspersky OS
At last – we’ve done it! I’ve anticipated this day for ages – the day when the first commercially available mass market hardware device based our own secure operating system landed on my desk.
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Kill Your Dependencies
This post talks about Ruby but it’s true of every language community: Python, JavaScript, Java, etc. The scourge of dependencies spares no one. This is a dependency visualization of every Rails app I’ve ever used. Does any of this sound familiar: Gemfile with 100s of entries. Test gems loading in production. Each…
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Linux debugging tools you'll love
New zine: Linux debugging tools you'll love
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Cheap HDMI capture for Linux
Lately I have had the need to do real time video capture from HDMI devices as of late for a project, and while looking around the internet found that all of the capture cards that are aimed at gamers (windows / OSX support only) or full blown production capture (Very expensive, more inputs than I need). The other…
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Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013)
I’ve been thinking about the lessons distributed systems engineers learn on the job. A great deal of our instruction is through scars made by mistakes made in production traffic. These scars are useful reminders, sure, but it’d be better to have more engineers with the full count of their fingers.
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Write a Shell in C (2015)
A tutorial on how to write a Unix shell in C.
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Jepsen: RethinkDB 2.1.5
In this Jepsen report, we’ll verify RethinkDB’s support for linearizable operations using majority reads and writes, and explore assorted read and write anomalies when consistency levels are relaxed. This work was funded by RethinkDB, and conducted in accordance with the Jepsen ethics policy .
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Zero Cost Abstractions
Rust claims to enable abstraction without overhead. How does that claim hold up in practice?
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I've been writing ring buffers wrong all these years
So there I was, implementing a one element ring buffer. Which, I'm sure you'll agree, is a perfectly reasonable data structure.
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Elixir RAM and the Template of Doom
I will attempt to convince you, in two lines of code, that Elixir is more interesting than any programming language you’ve ever used.