91
Distributed Systems Classics (2017)
A selected list of timeless and influential papers in distributed systems that shaped the research in the field. Intended to serve as a good…
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
92
What happened to WebAssembly
Where are they now? You won't believe her new look!
93
Python: The Optimization Ladder
Python loses every public benchmark by 21-875x. I took the exact problems people use to dunk on Python and climbed every rung of the optimization ladder -- from CPython version upgrades to Rust. Real numbers, real code, real effort costs.
94
Performance Improvements in .NET 11
Take a tour through hundreds of performance improvements in .NET 11.
95
Cloud VM benchmarks 2026
NOTE June 2026: Hetzner announced over 100% increases in prices. They will honour old prices for instances built before June 15th 2026, but for new instances the performance/price ratios show below are no longer valid.
96
How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
If you need a basic NAS and don't care about GUI features, it is suprisingly simple to set up a ZFS dataset and share it over the network using Samba.
97
During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
We recently passed the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene and its devastating impact on Western North Carolina. As a web developer, I am thinking again about my experience with the mobile web on the day after the storm.
98
We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled
How we used SKIP LOCKED, composite primary keys, and connection visibility to hit our scale targets.
99
Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager
Traditional Wayland compositors have a monolithic architecture that combines the compositor and window manager into a single program. This has the downside of requiring Wayland window managers to do the significant work of implementing an entire Wayland compositor as well.
100
Actually Queryable Executables
I was pleasantly surprised and happy to see that my article ‘Your executable is a SQLite database’ resonated with people. It is a format I have been thinking about for a while, and the idea seems to have struck a chord with others.
101
Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
News and information from Gentoo Linux
102
Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD
Last week we released version 0.2 of pgrust. This release was all about performance. It’s 10x faster than the previous version of pgrust. On OLTP benchmarks, pgrust is 30% faster than Postgres, and on Clickbench, Clickhouse’s benchmark for analytical databases, pgrust is 300x faster than Postgres. It’s even ahead of…
103
Idempotency is easy until the second request is different
Idempotency is not just an HTTP header or a key lookup. This article covers the failure cases that bite real APIs: different requests with the same key, concurrent retries, partial success, downstream uncertainty, response replay, expiry, and duplicate message handling.
104
We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
What we lose when we no longer have to learn how our computers work.
105
Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU
A storage appliance that shipped before AVX2 existed now runs Google's Gemma 4 26B in my basement, no GPU. Here's how we got a modern MoE model onto a CPU older than the instructions its inference engine assumed were there.
106
Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?
Wayland has been a broad misdirection and misallocation of time and developer resources at the expense of users. With more migration from other operating systems, the pressure to fix fundamental problems has become more prominent. After 17 years of development, now is a good time to reflect on some of the larger…
107
Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
Wayland is the successor to the X server (X11, Xorg) to implement the graphics stack on Linux. The Wayland project was actually started in 2008, a year before I created the i3 tiling window manager for X11 in 2009 — but for the last 18 years (!), Wayland was never usable on my computers. I don’t want to be stuck on…
108
NetBSD 11.0
The NetBSD project is pleased to (finally) announce the NetBSD 11.0 release ! See the release announcement for details.
109
Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts
Although I have to have a machine running macOS Tahoe to support our customers, I personally don't like the look of Liquid Glass, nor do I like some of the functional changes Apple has made in macOS Tahoe.
110
Fearless SIMD v1.0
Fearless SIMD v1.0 is here
111
RISC-V Is Sloooow
143 vs 36 minutes is far too big difference
112
Xfce is great
A post from David Gerard reminded me why I still use Xfce almost everywhere.
113
Libreboot 26.10 "Ominous Olive" released with UEFI, Chromebook support
Libreboot – Libreboot 26.10 “Ominous Olive” released! With full UEFI support.
114
What even is an OS now?
Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.
115
Linux 7.2
Igalia is an open source consulting firm specialised in the development of innovative projects and solutions. Our engineers have expertise in a wide range of technological areas, including browsers and client-side web technologies, graphics pipeline, compilers and virtual machines. We have the most WPE, WebKit…
116
I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
117
Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
Waymo will begin fully autonomous operations with its 6th-generation Driver —an important step in bringing our technology to more riders in more cities. This latest system serves as the primary engine for our next era of expansion, with a streamlined configuration that drives down costs while maintaining our…
118
Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
a digital garden by daniel phiri
119
Internet Archive's Storage
Internet Archive Staff Bruce Li introduces his The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting thus: Thi...
120
Measuring the sloppiness of code
Exploring how to measure code sloppiness, why correct code can still erode a codebase, and why human intuition and taste still matter.