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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 498 posts.

2019
91

The Paxos Algorithm, or How to Win a Turing Award

The lectures assume no prior knowledge of the Paxos consensus algorithm or of TLA+, the language in which the specifications are written. In fact, the lectures constitute a crash course on TLA+. If you're interested just in the algorithm, you will probably find the specs annoying and will try to read only the…

92

Infectious Executable Stacks

In software development there are many concepts that at first glance seem useful and sound, but, after considering the consequences of their implementation and use, are actually horrifying. Examples include thread cancellation , variable length arrays , and memory aliasing . GCC’s closure extension to C is another…

101

Why Do Buses Bunch?

Created by Lewis Lehe (of Setosa and UC Berkeley Trans. Eng. ) with design and art by Dennys Hess . Thanks to Ian Johnson for good advice. Tools: d3 , Angular Material , Coffeescript , Browserify , Gulp and Five-Hour Energy Drink .

109

Why Const Doesn't Make C Code Faster

In a post a few months back I said it’s a popular myth that const is helpful for enabling compiler optimisations in C and C++ . I figured I should explain that one, especially because I used to believe it was obviously true, myself. I’ll start off with some theory and artificial examples, then I’ll do some experiments…

116

Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

In this regularly but rarely updated article, which is without doubt the most comprehensive list of Linux distributions' problems on the entire Internet, we only discuss their main problems and shortcomings (which may be the reason why some people say Linux distros are not ready for the desktop) while everyone should…

120

Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

I’m working on more posts about the Catalina release, but I wanted to start with a short warning. I’ve heard a bunch of reports of data loss in Apple Mail. Thankfully, none seem to be caused by my apps . (Ironically, one of the bugs I’ve encountered is the inability to delete messages via AppleScript.) And, in fact…