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The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
Teens wrote me a secret. I found them.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 399 posts.
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Engineering for Slow Internet
How to minimize user frustration in Antarctica.
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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections . Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds , making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't…
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It's always TCP_NODELAY
The first thing I check when debugging latency issues in distributed systems is whether TCP_NODELAY is enabled. And it’s not just me. Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option, suggesting that the default behavior is wrong, and perhaps…
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Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities
macOS comes with a lot of built-in utilities. Here's a list of some that I find interesting.
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Maestro: A Linux-compatible kernel in Rust
Maestro is a Unix-like kernel and operating system written from scratch in Rust
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Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison
NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?
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Boeing whistleblower: MAX 9 production line has "enormous volume of defects"
A reader at respected airline industry site Leeham News offered a comment that suggests they have access to Boeing’s internal quality control systems, and shares details of what they saw regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 9 flown by Alaska Airlines that had a door plug detach inflight, causing rapid decompression of the…
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In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)
Wave is a $1.7B company with 70 engineers 1 whose product is a CRUD app that adds and subtracts numbers. In keeping with this, our architecture is a standard CRUD app architecture, a Python monolith on top of Postgres. Starting with a simple architecture and solving problems in simple ways where possible has allowed…
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Linux/4004: booting Linux on Intel 4004 for fun, art, and no profit
Dmitry.GR: Slowly booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit
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M4 Mac mini's efficiency
I had to pause some of my work getting a current-gen AMD graphics card running on the Pi 5 and testing a 192-core AmpereOne server to quickly post on the M4's efficiency. I expected M4 to be better than M1/M2 (I haven't personally tested M3), and I hoped it would at least match the previous total-system-power…
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Extreme Pi Boot Optimization
🚀 3.5 sec to Linux userspace code
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John Carmack on inlined code (2014)
(Here begins a comment written by John Carmack in 2014, about an email he sent to a programmers’ mailing list in 2007.)
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How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner
A high-level overview of how PostgreSQL stores data on disk, covering segments, pages and more.
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WebP: The WebPage Compression Format
I want to provide a smooth experience to my site visitors, so I work on accessibility and ensure it works without JavaScript enabled. I care about page load time because some pages contain large illustrations, so I minify my HTML. But one thing makes turning my blog light as a feather a pain in the ass.
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How much faster are the Gnome 46 terminals?
I use a hardware latency tester to measure how much the VTE-based terminals improved from GNOME 45 to GNOME 46.
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How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster
This is the fascinating story of how researchers used Bloom filters cleverly to make SQLite 10x faster for analytical queries. These are my five-minute notes on the paper SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
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How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it (2014)
How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it!
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The One Billion Row Challenge in Go: from 1m45s to 4s in nine solutions
How I solved the One Billion Row Challenge (1BRC) in Go nine times, from a simple unoptimised version that takes 1 minute 45 seconds, to an optimised and parallelised version that takes 3.4 seconds.
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Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases
Apple uses Cassandra and FoundationDB for CloudKit, their cloud backend service. We take a look into how exactly each is used within their cloud and the problems they've solved.
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Booting Linux off of Google Drive
Competitiveness is a vice of mine. When I heard that a friend got Linux to boot off of NFS, I had to one-up her. I had to prove that I could create...
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OpenZFS deduplication is good now and you shouldn't use it
OpenZFS 2.3.0 will be released any day now, and it includes the new “Fast Dedup” feature. My team at Klara spent many months in 2023 and 2024 working on it, and we reckon it’s pretty good, a huge step up from the old dedup as well as being a solid base for further improvements. I’ve been watching various forums and…
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Making USB devices – end to end guide to your first gadget
Introduction to implementing USB devices. Minimal overview of hardware and software with an example with STM32 microcontroller. Also contains an index to very detailed guides for more information.
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Cloning a Laptop over NVMe TCP
Recently, I got a new laptop and had to set it up so I could start using it. But I wasn't really in the mood to go through the same old steps which I had explained in this post earlier . I was complaining about this to my colleague, and there came the suggestion of why not copy the entire disk to the new laptop…
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Attacking UNIX Systems via CUPS
Hello friends, this is the first of two, possibly three (if and when I have time to finish the Windows research) writeups. We will start with targeting GNU/Lin…