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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 543 posts.
Most books and courses introduce Linux through shell commands, leaving the kernel as a mysterious black box doing magic behind the scenes. In this post, we will run some experiments to demystify it: the Linux kernel is just a binary that you can build and run.
In the past few years, CPUs have gotten really fast. Shockingly fast! Yet most people are stuck on previous generation mobile chips (whether by choice, or by their companies choice), at a huge detriment to their productivity. Meanwhile, AI coding subscriptions like Cursor are all the rage these days. I'll skip the…
From black screens and boot issues to rendering quirks and PAC puzzles, here’s what we learned getting iOS to finally say hello.
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…
Software Engineer
Pattern recognition can see through obfuscated code to find the right instruction
Many Ruby applications allocate objects. What if we could make allocating objects six times faster? We can! Read on to learn more!
I bought a MacBook Air M2. As of writing, it's very affordable with the 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 13.6" model available for $750. As of writing, also Asahi Linux doesn't support anything newer than M2.
A concise breakdown of what smallpond and 3FS are, how to use them, and if they're suitable for your data processing needs.
We introduce Polars Cloud, the distributed cloud architecture to scale and run Polars anywhere.
Configuring PipeWire to make laptop speakers sound better (Bankstown, Convolution/FIR, etc.)
Using a decommissioned Alibaba cloud accelerator card as an FPGA dev board
How dare you!
Unleashing Film Grain Synthesis on Netflix and Enhancing Visuals for Millions
The last few days I spent some time digging into the recently announced KIP-1150 ("Diskless Kafka"), as well AutoMQ’s Kafka fork, tightly integrating Apache Kafka and object storage, such as S3. …
So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2…
How do you fit a dictionary in 64kb RAM? Unix engineers solved it with clever data structures and compression tricks. Here's the fascinating story behind it.
A novel technique for implementing dynamic language interpreters in Go, applied to the Vitess SQL evaluation engine
Programming notes for Unreal Engine, Houdini, Game Development, Math, & Graphics
XTX Markets is a leading algorithmic trading firm which uses state-of-the-art machine learning technology to produce price forecasts for over 50,000 financial instruments across equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities and crypto. It uses those forecasts to trade on exchanges and alternative trading venues, and…
They're Mario Bros. for the NES, apparently.
Sharded Postgres by the team behind Vitess
We have fried two Ryzen 9950X CPUs in a few months by running GMP tests and the GMP-based factoring program GMP-ECM . This is not expected, of course. In this page, we provide as much information as possible to help analysing the problem.
Exploring LSM tree implementation in PostgreSQL for better write performance.
The Rust language ecosystem is growing each day, its popularity increasing, and with good reason. It’s the only mainstream language that provides memory and concurrency safety at compile time…
In JDK 25, Strings used as keys in immutable Maps can be much faster.
A deep dive into how Linux manages process memory, page tables, and virtual address spaces
