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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.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,935 posts.
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Forking Chrome to render in a terminal
I wrote about forking Chrome to turn HTML to SVG two months ago, today we're going to do something similar by making it render into a terminal.
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The Waymo World Model
We are excited to introduce the Waymo World Model, a frontier generative model that sets a new bar for large-scale, hyper-realistic autonomous driving simulation.
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Load Balancing
A bottom-up, animated guide to HTTP load balancing algorithms.
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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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Completely Silent Computer
I’ve been trying to make my computers quieter for nearly three decades. Custom liquid cooling loops, magnetically-stabilised fluid-dynamic bearings, acoustic dampeners, silicone shock absorb…
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I use zip bombs to protect my server
The majority of the traffic on the web is from bots. For the most part, these bots are used to discover new content. These are RSS Feed readers, search engines crawling your content, or nowadays AI bo
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QOI: Lossless Image Compression in O(n) Time
Introducing QOI — the Quite OK Image Format . It losslessly compresses RGB and RGBA images to a similar size of PNG, while offering a 20x-50x speedup in compression and 3x-4x speedup in decompression. All single-threaded, no SIMD. It's also stupidly simple .
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The largest Git repo
It’s been 3 months since I first wrote about our efforts to scale Git to extremely large projects and teams with an effort we called “Git Virtual File System”. As a reminder, GVFS, together with a set of enhancements to Git, enables Git to scale to VERY large repos by virtualizing both the .git folder […]
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Tales of the M1 GPU
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
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24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse
This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM an…
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Engineering for Slow Internet
How to minimize user frustration in Antarctica.
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The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018
Dave Kerr, partner and Head of Engineering at QuantumBlack Labs, McKinsey & Company. Writing on software engineering and agentic AI.
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Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
Amazon produces and delivers to customers world-class entertainment via Prime Video, Amazon MGM Studios, MGM+, Amazon Music, Audible, Wondery, Amazon Games, and Twitch. Amazon’s entertainment properties empower millions of customers around the world to enjoy a massive selection of the very best in…
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Optimizing web servers for high throughput and low latency
Dash knows your context, your team, and your work, so your team can stay organized, easily find and share knowledge, and keep projects secure, all from one place.
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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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Booting from a vinyl record
Most PCs tend to boot from a primary media storage, be it a hard disk drive, or a solid-state drive, perhaps from a network, or – if all else fails – the USB stick or the boot DVD comes to the rescue… Fun, eh? Boring! Why don’t we try to boot from a record player for a change?
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Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning
This post will walk you through the performance tuning steps that I took to serve 1.2 million JSON 'API' requests per second from a 4 vCPU AWS EC2 instance.
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Unbricking a $2k bike with a $10 Raspberry Pi
A few years ago I splurged on an exercise bike. It’s a pretty expensive item imho, both in upfront and ongoing subscription costs. But I was able to justify it by riding it all the time so that per-ride it wasn’t that expensive. I’m happy to say this was a huge boon for my fitness and it was worth every penny.
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Good system design
I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are…
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We reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100x
I’m going to cover a lot of ground in this post, so here’s the TLDR: We built a Twitter-scale Mastodon instance from scratch in only 10k lines of code. This is 100x less code than the ~1M lines Twi…
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Systems Design for Advanced Beginners
This post is part of my Programming for Advanced Beginners series. Subscribe now to receive specific, actionable ways to make your code cleaner, every other week, entirely free.
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An update on recent Claude Code quality reports
We traced recent reports of Claude Code quality issues to three separate changes. Here's what happened, what we fixed, and what we're changing.