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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.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
32
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
35
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…
36
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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Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc
Meta recognizes the long-term benefits of jemalloc, a high-performance memory allocator, in its software infrastructure. We are renewing focus on jemalloc, aiming to reduce maintenance needs and mo…
38
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.
39
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.
40
How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale
How OpenAI rebuilt its WebRTC stack to power real-time Voice AI with low latency, global scale, and seamless conversational turn-taking.
41
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...
42
The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation
Offensive content in the eyes of a software engineer.
43
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.
44
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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Saving another 100TB of RAM
Cloudflare's global network is immense but not limitless. As we look for small ways to trim our resource usage, we sometimes get lucky and we can cut significantly more. Here’s how we reduced one of our Pingora-based service's RAM usage with statistics.
47
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…
48
DuckDB Internals Part 1
Walk through DuckDB's internals: how it skips serialization overhead, parses and optimizes SQL, and stores data in columnar row groups with zone maps.
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Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
50
Cosmologically Unique IDs
We are an exploratory species, just past the solar system now, but perhaps one day we will look back and call our galaxy merely the first. There are many problems to solve along the way, and today we will look at one very small one. How do we assign IDs to devices (or any object) so the IDs are guaranteed to always be…
51
First public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on Apple M5
Apple spent five years building hardware and software to make memory corruption exploits dramatically harder. Our engineers, working together with Mythos Preview, built a working exploit in five days.
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We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
How a specification surfaced a defect in the Apollo flight code.
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Gentoo on Codeberg
News and information from Gentoo Linux
55
The browser's main thread is expensive
What comes to mind when you hear "frontend optimization"? For most of us it's things like reducing network requests, shrinking the bundle,…
56
FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
My old 2016 MacBook Pro has been collecting dust in a cabinet for some time now. The laptop suffers from a “flexgate” problem, and I don’t have any practical use for it. For quite some time, I’ve been thinking about repurposing it as a guinea pig, to play with FreeBSD — an OS that I’d aspired to play with for a long…
57
Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years
Claude Code has gotten extremely good at finding security vulnerabilities, and this is only the beginning.
58
RIP, Harvest
I’ve been a self-employed contractor for about a decade now, and I’m bummed about Harvest .
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Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations
Creative ideas for speeding up queries in PostgreSQL
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Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
Personal website of Cody Ho