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Three Laws of Software Complexity
I posit that most software engineers (particularly those working on infrastructural systems) are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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You can list a directory containing 8 million files But not with ls..
I needed to list all files in a directory, but ls , find , and os.listdir all hung. This is my story.
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Adventures in /usr/bin and the likes
Digging up some useful and not so popular commands in Linux
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Communicating Sequential Processes
With the arrival of core.async , ClojureScript provides a powerful advantage over other popular compile to JavaScript languages like CoffeeScript , Dart , and TypeScript . These languages fail to address the single largest source of incidental complexity for any sizeable client side application - concurrency. In my…
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How we found and fixed an eBPF Linux kernel vulnerability
This blog post takes a look at the years where eBPF was one of the kernel subsystems that grabbed the attention of a lot of security researchers. We will tell the story of how we discovered CVE-2023-2163, what our root-cause analysis process looked like, and what we did to ultimately fix the issue.
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Emulating an iPhone in QEMU
From black screens and boot issues to rendering quirks and PAC puzzles, here’s what we learned getting iOS to finally say hello.
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I/O Access Methods for Linux
Explore the four different ways to perform disk I/O on Linux and the tradeoffs and what we chose for ScyllaDB to build a high-performing database.
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Online migrations at scale
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
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Using Erlang hot code updates
One of the Erlang ecosystem's spiciest nerd snipes are hot code updates. Because it can do it. In ways that almost no other runtime can. I use Elixir which builds on Erlang and has the same capabilities.
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Call me maybe: Cassandra
Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in…
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Analyzing the codebase of Caffeine, a high performance caching library
The other day, while wasting time reading reddit, I stumbled upon a blogpost mentioning S3 FIFO, a method claiming to outperform LRU (Least Recently Used) in terms of cache miss ratio. Notable companies like RedPandas, Rising Wave, and Cloudflare have already implemented it in various capacities, so this piqued my…
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eBPF Is Awesome
A blog about programming, technology and open-source stuff.
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Bpftrace for Linux 2018
bpftrace (DTrace 2.0) for Linux 2018: the bpftrace front-end
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The six dumbest ideas in computer security (2005)
There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to the fact that it's…
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Microservices are hard
Over the past years I attended hundreds of interviews. Many candidates proudly told tales on how they develop their projects with a microservice architecture. Often (I don’t want to say “always”, but from my memory I think it actually is “always”) it does not require many questions to see that they used a rocket…
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State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
Software Engineer
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You can't fool the optimizer
Pattern recognition can see through obfuscated code to find the right instruction
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Wendelstein 7-X achieves world record
In the past experimentation round Wendelstein 7-X achieved higher temperatures and densities of the plasma, longer pulses and the stellarator world record for the fusion product. Moreover, first confirmation for the optimisation concept on which Wendelstein 7-X is based, was obtained. Wendelstein 7-X at Max Planck…
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Are we shooting ourselves in the foot with stack overflows?
How-to articles about designing safe, reliable, and secure embedded systems.
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Fast Allocations in Ruby 3.5
Many Ruby applications allocate objects. What if we could make allocating objects six times faster? We can! Read on to learn more!
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Smaller, faster, safer: running Kimi and GLM at scale
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.
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Asahi Linux Progress Report: January/February 2021
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
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My First Unikernel
I wanted to make a simple REST service for queuing file uploads, deployable as a virtual machine. The traditional way to do this is to download a …
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Monoliths are not dinosaurs
Building evolvable software systems is a strategy, not a religion. And revisiting your architectures with an open mind is a must.
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