271
I hate compilers
You'd think that given the same bytes of input you'd get the same bytes of output. lol. lmao. No, you don't. It's complicated.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
272
Writing Efficient C++ Code (2013)
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273
I hate: Programming Wayland applications
If you want to program a graphical application for linux, your primary choices are using either X11 or Wayland. According to Wikipedia, X11 had its first release in 1984. X11 follows a client-server-model. I assume it's because the whole computational environment, was very different back then. If you have a central…
274
IBM Unveils Next Generation Dual-Architecture Processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE
The new processor is being developed to allow organizations to run Arm-native Linux environments simultaneously with z/OS and Linux on IBM Z, while benefiting from IBM’s established security, reliability, and scale.
275
Let's discuss sandbox isolation
A dive into the spectrum of sandboxing and isolation, from Linux namespaces and gVisor to hardware-enforced microVMs and WebAssembly, and why picking the right boundary matters for multi-tenant workloads.
276
Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
An introduction to my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad addiction Over 10 years ago I got my first ThinkPad x60. I got interested in free software by reading the about GNU …
277
BIO: The Bao I/O Coprocessor
BIO is the I/O co-processor in the Baochip-1x, a mostly open source 22nm SoC I helped design. You can read more about the Baochip-1x’s background here , or pick up an evaluation board at Crowd Supply .
278
curl > /dev/sda: How I made a Linux distro that runs wget | dd
How I made a Linux distro that runs `wget | dd`
279
How TimescaleDB compresses time-series data
TimescaleDB compression with hypercore - columnar storage with up to 98% ratio in PostgreSQL. segmentby/orderby configuration and a benchmark for IoT and time-series.
280
Hardware hotplug events on Linux, the gory details
Maybe the code shouldn't be the only documentation?
281
A macOS bug that causes TCP networking to stop working after 49.7 days
At Photon, we are developing the world’s most complete iMessage API (with RCS and SMS fallback) for agents: infrastructure that lets Agents reliably communicate through one of the most native messaging interfaces people already use. While building it, we run Mac-backed systems continuously and care a lot about making…
282
State of multi-player Wayland
I've been fascinated by the idea of attaching multiple mice to one computer, and then having multiple mouse cursors inside of one desktop environment!
283
An ode to bzip
The story goes like this. ComputerCraft is a mod that adds programming to Minecraft. You write Lua code that gets executed by a bespoke interpreter with access to world APIs, and now you’re writing code instead of having fun. Computers have limited disk space, and my /nix folder is growing out of control, so I need to…
284
Allocating on the Stack
A description of some of the recent changes to do allocations on the stack instead of the heap.
285
OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break
We made a YouTube video showing how NonBioS can deploy OpenClaw on a fresh Linux VM automatically - zero human intervention, about 7 minutes start to finish.
286
Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one
A very primitive version of recovery.
287
Windows GOG DOS Games on M-Series Macs
GOG is great. I bought a few old games from them: SimCity 2000, Theme Hospital, Syndicate Plus. And by old games, I mean games from my childhood that still
288
A tale about fixing eBPF spinlock issues in the Linux kernel
A system freeze led us deep into Linux spinlock internals, where we helped find not one but three bugs in the kernel's resilient locking code used by eBPF.
289
CPU Counters on Apple Silicon: article + tool
Last time I wrote about profiling in Zig on Apple Silicon, I touched on PMU counter profiling. This time I decided to go further and create my own tool to fetch all available counters for Apple Silicon processors (M1, M2, and later). Brief explanation of PMU counters PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) counters are…
290
JIT Compiling Code in 5μs
Build a copy-and-patch JIT compiler in Rust, generate ARM64 machine code, and benchmark it against an interpreter and handwritten implementation.
291
Zig’s Io.Threaded is neat
std.Io.Threaded is one of the implementations of Zig's new Io interface that enables concurrency. This is a boring just use threads impl. I personally find it neat though --- it does this weird thing that I wanted to do for ages, that to my knowledge no one else is doing properly, and implements it better than I…
292
Index, Count, Offset, Size
Wherein we make progress towards solving one of the most vexing problems of Computer Science — naming things.
293
How Is Data Stored?
Invariably, it involves trying to trap electrons in increasingly complicated ways.
294
Reports of Telnet's death have been greatly exaggerated
Terrace runs sensors attackers cannot tell from real targets. We see new attack sources first, record what they do, and ship the block rules while the attack is still running.
295
Raspberry Pi Pico 2 at 873.5MHz with 3.05V Core Abuse
Adventures with dry ice and RP2350 - how fast can it go?
296
Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
Almost every notable managed Postgres provider bundles a connection pooler, giving us a strong hint that connection management is a product problem rather than a user problem.
297
How Fast Does Claude, Acting as a User Space IP Stack, Respond to Pings?
Here is a fun thought: if we ask Claude Code to act as a user space IP stack, how quickly will it be able to respond to a ping?
298
Fixing a Buffer Overflow in Unix v4 Like It's 1973
This blog post shows how to fix a buffer overflow in the su progam of UNIX v4
299
Discovering hard disk physical geometry through microbenchmarking (2019)
Modern hard drives store an incredible amount of data in a small space, and are still the default choice for high-capacity (though not highest-performance) storage. While hard drives have been around since the 1950s, the current 3.5″ form factor (actually 4″ wide) appeared in the early 1980s. Since then, the capacity…
300
When “idle” isn't idle: how a Linux kernel optimization became a QUIC bug
We investigated a bug where CUBIC's congestion window became pinned at its minimum floor, causing a performance to plummet. The fix involved correctly measuring idle periods to distinguish RTT wait times from actual application idleness.