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I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) running natively on the Nintendo Wii
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 340 posts.
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Pi 1.0
Today we are shipping Pi 1.0, a hardened, minimal, extensible agent harness, alongside Pi Durable, a new experimental substrate for long-running agentic applications.
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WTF Ubuntu?
In case you missed it: CVE-2026-98432 is a critical (CVSS 9.8) bug in the Linux kernel's TCP code. It's been there since 2016, so virtually every Linux server on the planet has it, and it can be hit remotely. Anthropic says it built a working exploit that gets root on a server. A total takeover.
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I am building a cloud
Today is fundraising announcement day . As is the nature of writing for a larger audience, it is a formal, safe announcement. As it should be. Writing must necessarily become impersonal at scale. But I would like to write something personal about why I am doing this. What is the goal of building exe.dev ? I am already…
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Libghostty 1.0
libghostty-vt 1.0 is here. libghostty is a portable, high-performance C library for terminal emulation, extracted directly from the core of Ghostty. The 1.0 release means both the library itself and the C ABI are now stable.
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Running Tesla Model 3's computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars
David Schütz's bug bounty writeups
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PGSimCity - How PostgreSQL Works
An independent, non-commercial educational visualization of PostgreSQL internals. Not affiliated with Electronic Arts.
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The 49MB web page
A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.
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I fixed Windows native development
Imagine you’re maintaining a native project. You use Visual Studio for building on Windows, so you do the responsible thing and list it as a dependency
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The session you cannot take with you
Inference APIs are filling sessions with encrypted reasoning, hidden search results, opaque compaction, and encrypted subagent messages. A growing form of lock-in.
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A 10 year old Xeon is all you need
Or running Gemma 4 on a 2016 Xeon with no GPU, 25 flags, 128 GB of DDR3, and a 25B-parameter MoE.
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Everyone should know SIMD
SIMD has a reputation for being complex. I've met many very good software engineers who dismiss it as something too complex to learn or a niche optimization meant for only the highest-performance software, not useful in everyday programming.
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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying that people talking about how LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly. We're not quite at the point where we want to write everything in assembly , but some variant of what Nolan Lawson said about…
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Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?
I made my next game twice as fast by forking go's crypto library
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Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak
A few months ago, users started reporting that Ghostty was consuming absurd amounts of memory, with one user reporting 37 GB after 10 days of uptime. Today, I'm happy to say the fix has been found and merged . This post is an overview of what caused the leak, a look at some of Ghostty's internals, and some brief…
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The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon
Due to some lucky circumstances, I recently had the chance to appear in one of the biggest German gaming podcasts, Stay Forever, to talk about the technology of RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999). It was …
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What Is a Harness?
An agent harness is a piece of software that provides an environment for an AI model to operate within.
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Executable Is a SQLite Database
I have been probably obsessed with two things in the last few years: Nix as a tool to explore innovative ideas that require the capability to rebuild the world and replacing ELF with SQLite as an executable format. You might have noticed that these two ideas are well suited to each other.
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Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
How Pi's minimal harness improves coding-agent cost and performance, with examples from Databricks and Shopify's pi-autoresearch extension.
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Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM
Earlier this year, I blogged about work I did to improve VRAM management for games. Now, after many months of floating around in mailing lists, the kernel patches are finally merged upstream and queued for Linux 7.3! Hooray!
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My server is a phone now
rooting a CMF Phone 1 to run my personal infrastructure at home.
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Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
A blog post about finding the oldest Windows application with a GUI that still runs on Windows 11
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Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root
A security issue in Omarchy’s default Docker configuration meant that essentially every program running in the user’s desktop session could escalate to root without a password, sudo, or a privilege prompt. If you use Omarchy, the most important takeaway is simple: update to 4.0.1. I reported this issue privately…
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Why I love FreeBSD
A personal reflection on my first encounter with FreeBSD in 2002, how it shaped the way I design and run systems, and why its philosophy, stability, and community still matter to me more than twenty years later.
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Pi Durable
Pi Durable is a new experimental package for long-running, durable, and malleable agents that can run anywhere. A tour of what we built and why.
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You can't trust macOS Privacy and Security settings
How to gain access to the contents of privacy-protected folders even though Privacy & Security settings say that access is denied.
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Everything in C is undefined behavior
If he had been a programmer, Cardinal Richelieu would have said “Give me six lines written by the hand of the most expert C programmer in the world, and I wi...
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How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
breakdown of the architecture behind Linear's speed: local-first sync, MobX observables, instant first loads, and a keyboard-first design.
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How fast is N tokens per second really?
Every local-LLM benchmark reports throughput: "47 tok/s on an M3," "180 tok/s on a 4090," "500 tok/s on Groq." Unless you've actually watched tokens stream at those rates, the numbers are hard to internalize. This is the rendering.
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How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?
People still tell me that CPUs are boring. That nothing much happens anymore. Let us look at AMD Ryzen 7 processors from 2022 to 2024: the 5800X3D (Zen 3), the 7800X3D (Zen 4) and the 9800X3D (Zen 5). They are comparable 8-core chips with 3D V-Cache. I have written about them before, in How stagnant … Continue reading…