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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 518 posts.
Welcome to the first feature article on our site. We’re going to cover an ongoing problem with x86 emulation that affects every application that we emulate. This comes down to a single over-arching term that has wide-reaching ramifications; Emulating the x86 Total Store Ordering memory model (x86-TSO) .
What I learned mining 125,000 vulnerabilities from Linux git history. The average kernel bug lives 2.1 years before discovery, but some subsystems are far worse.
Tracing one vector-add kernel from nvcc all the way down to the warps that execute it.
Why a filter is slowest when it keeps half of random input, and what a branchless rewrite gains there and loses at 1%.
Firecracker is supposed to keep untrusted code inside a microVM. We escaped it and achieved code execution as root on the host.
Arch Linux ARM on the ASUS ProArt P16, with a bootable installer, published Windows comparisons, and local Qwen inference.
My last post on the Rust compiler’s performance was two months ago and a lot has happened since then.
I have spent a large portion of my career working in Java. In that time, you get used to huge classes. New functionality? Just add a new method and field to the class. The cost of each new field is rarely considered. Performance is often considered from a classic computer science perspective by considering asymptotic…
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned about recently is the engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Here are the key requirements it’s designed to meet: Store …
FFmpeg is truly a multi-tool for media processing. As an industry-standard tool it supports a wide variety of audio and video codecs and container formats. It can also orchestrate complex chains of…
Starting with v2.0, scheduled for fall 2026, DuckDB will support asynchronous reads of Parquet and CSV files. This can significantly speed up queries when synchronous I/O does not saturate the available bandwidth, as is typical in EC2/S3 compute-storage setups.
Neki, sharded Postgres by PlanetScale, is now available in platform preview.
Latest Geekbench performance figures for macOS VMs, and testing of how few cores and how little memory is really needed: could you run a macOS VM usefully on a MacBook Neo?
Node.js now has a virtual filesystem. Learn why VFS matters for testing, sandboxing, Single Executable Apps, and running generated code directly in me
I found this tiny fanless Thunderbolt 25G Ethernet adapter. With a little tinkering, it actually works.
ReactOS is a free, opensource reimplementation of windows
When your database CPU is at 100%, what is it actually doing? Memory stalls, CPU caches, and how radix partitioning makes GROUP BY faster.
This blog post goes into quite some detail about how I first booted Linux on my M4 Mac mini. I encourage you to look up terms and concepts you don’t know, since I cannot explain all the background in this post ;)
We are under warning that macOS 27 is likely to remove support for AFP, and lately some additional requirements for connection to certain servers. This explains how these could affect you.
zeroserve is a small, fast, zero-config HTTPS server. You hand it a tarball of a website and it serves it - over HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, with hot reload and a tiny resident footprint. The twist is that you can drop eBPF programs into the tarball and they run on every request, in userspace, as sandboxed middleware …
Apple silicon architecture is designed to get background processes out of the way of our apps running in the foreground, by using the E cores.
When deploying large language models in production, the inference engine becomes a critical piece of infrastructure.
Broadcom pulled public VMware VDDK downloads, creating new challenges for customers migrating to Azure, Nutanix, OpenShift, KVM, and other platforms.
Sorry for the clickbait title. I promise this post delivers: 44100 Hz stereo with near-Opus bitrates using about 4% of the N64’s CPU time.
Serving frontier models like Kimi and GLM means fighting for GPU memory. Here's how we quantize KV caches, compress model weights, and add integrity checks to serve them faster, cheaper, and safely.
It came after ud0 and ud1.
If you happen to find yourself in a sysadmin position, or a position where you just so happen to maintain someone’s infrastructure , chances are that at some point in time the topic “we need a cache” comes up.
Recently Ben Hoyt published a blog post claiming that contrary to popular belief, I/O is not the bottleneck in typical programming interview problems such as counting word frequencies from a stream. Sequential read speed has come a long way, while CPU speed has stagnated.
In a quest to reduce the number of processes running in macOS Tahoe, consider the example of Time Machine backups, which can easily be replaced by 3rd party alternatives.
This one is going to be a quick one as there wasn't anything new discovered. In fact, I feel quite dumb. This is really a tale of " Do your research before acting and know what your goal is, " as you'll end up saving yourself a lot of time. Nobody likes throwing away work they've done either, and there could be…
