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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 543 posts.
The way I was taught x86 assembly at the university had been completely outdated for many years by the time I had my first class. It was around 2008 or 2009, and 64-bit processors had already started becoming a thing even in my neck of the woods. Meanwhile, we were doing DOS, real-mode, memory segmentation and all the…
We have some very fast AI-generated kernels in pure CUDA-C without using libraries and DSLs such as CUTLASS and Triton. They are performing close to or in some cases even beating the standard expert-optimized production kernels shipped in PyTorch. Some of our highlighted results:
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
You copied the green screen.
I’m entirely convinced that basically every developer alive today heard the adage “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” and figured that, since they always wear jeans and a t-shirt anyway, they might as well apply it to their systems’ architecture. This explains why the stack of every single company I’ve…
Learn how NAT traversal works, how Tailscale can get through and securely connect your devices directly to each other.
A story from 16 years ago - trust, tech, and a server that had to disappear. They offered me a blank check. I said no.
Feeling like a kid in a candy store, once more
The target system was a distributed data processing platform that ran across hundreds of thousands of machines. At such scales, a 0.5% improvement would easily make up my salary going forward, and 2% was a good result for the half.
Asynchrony is not concurrency.
Announcing AoCO 2025 - daily December posts about compiler optimisations
ASIF disk images are new in Tahoe, and promise to be space efficient, as they’re sparse files, and almost as fast as the disk they’re stored on. Ideal for VMs and general use.
A technical report on three bugs that intermittently degraded Claude's responses: what happened, why fixes took time, and what we're changing.
Databricks offers a unified platform for data, analytics and AI. Build better AI with a data-centric approach. Simplify ETL, data warehousing, governance and AI on the Data + AI Platform.
📌 This is a cross-post from DEVCORE. The research was first published at Black Hat Europe 2024. Personally, I would like to thank splitline, the co-author of this research & article, whose help
Thesis: We should create a distro of Linux that runs Windows binaries by default via Wine.
Securely connect to anything on the internet with Tailscale. Built on WireGuard®️, Tailscale enables you to make finely configurable connections, secured end-to-end according to zero trust principles, between any resources on any infrastructure.
Learn why SQLite-on-the-server fits hyper-scale systems when each tenant gets an isolated database with local reads, durable storage, and simple…
Motivation Around 20% of Firefox’s HTTP traffic today uses HTTP/3, which runs over QUIC, which in turn runs over UDP. This translates to substantial UDP I/O activity. Firefox uses NSPR for most of its network I/O. When it comes to UDP I/O, NSPR only offers a limited set of dated APIs, most relevant here PR_SendTo and…
ClickHouse learned to procrastinate strategically. Discover how lazy materialization skips unnecessary column reads to accelerate queries.
Learn how Amazon built the backbone of the modern web that scales to 1 PB/s and 150M QPS on commodity hard drives
I gave a talk at the Berkeley I-school's Information Access Seminar entitled Archival Storage . Below the fold is the text of the talk with...
This app has a surprising number of anti-debugging protections. Let's figure out how to bypass them.
What is TCP? This post is an exploration of TCP, the workhorse of the internet. This deep dive includes detailed examples and a step-by-step walkthrough. A simple TCP explanation.
Exploring a minimal implementation of a time-sharing kernel on RISC-V, implemented in Zig, on top of OpenSBI.
What should you do with your unclosed browser tabs? I ran pong in mine.
TinyKVM can be used to sandbox regular Linux programs or programs with specialized APIs embedded into your servers.
A detective story with a silly ending
About a year ago, Hetzner launched the AX162 server line. It offered better price / performance than its predecessor, AX161. We were very excited to adopt it, but we soon encountered serious reliability issues. We observed that the new servers had 16 times higher annual failure rates.
