2281
A sharded DuckDB on 63 nodes runs 1T row aggregation challenge in 5 sec
What happens when you give a distributed SQL engine a trillion-row dataset? GizmoEdge crushed the Coiled challenge with a 1,000-worker cluster on Azure.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
2282
The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud
That standard image that explains the difference between on-premises, IAAS, PAAS, and SAAS in the cloud? You know what, it is hugely misleading. Here is the real deal.
2283
How much faster is Redis at storing a blob of JSON compared to Postgres?
tl;dr; Redis is 16 times faster at reading these JSON blobs.*
2284
UA 1093
On Thursday, 16 October, Foreign Object Debris (FOD) struck the windshield of UA1093, a 737 MAX aircraft, at approximately 36,000 ft. WindBorne began investigating…
2285
WasmBoxC: Simple, Fast, and VM-Less Sandboxing
The software ecosystem has a lot of useful but unsafe code, and the easier it is to sandbox that code, the moreoften that’ll happen. If it were as simple as ...
2286
2287
macOS's Little-Known Command-Line Sandboxing Tool (2025)
AVAILABLE NOW OpenAI, Anthropic, and Chrome ship it. Apple deprecated it. Nobody documented it. Until now. → sandbox-exec: The Miss...
2288
Jepsen: Bufstream 0.1
2024-11-13 : An earlier version of this report asserted that consumers with auto-commit enabled could lose data by automatically committing offsets returned by the most recent poll. This claim was based in part on Confluent’s documentation , which states:
2289
A x64 OS #1: UEFI
I briefly cover what it takes to start writing a kernel which bootstraps in UEFI, as opposed to BIOS.
2290
Optimizing Open Addressing
Your default hash table should be open-addressed, using Robin Hood linear probing with backward-shift deletion. When prioritizing deterministic performance over memory efficiency, two-way chaining is also a good choice.
2291
2292
Fallacies of distributed systems
Fallacies of distributed systems are a set of assertions made by L Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems describing false assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.
2293
2294
Mo RAM, Mo Problems (2025)
As a retro-computer enthusiast, it seems that parts are either insanely expensive or dirt cheap. If the first case has obvious problems, the second can also lead to issues.
2295
Syscall Auditing at Scale
If you are are an engineer whose organization uses Linux in production, I have two quick questions for you: 1) How many unique outbound TCP connections have your servers made in the past hour? 2) Which processes and users initiated each of those connections? If you can answer both of these questions, fantastic! You…
2296
Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina
A bundle called IncompatibleAppsList.bundle found in /Library/Apple/Library/Bundles/ in macOS Catalina contains a of list of 235 apps that are incompatible with Catalina.
2297
Handles are the better pointers (2018)
28-Nov-2018: I’ve added a small update at the end on how to prevent‘handle collisions’ with a per-slot generation counter
2298
2299
No NAT November: My month without IPv4
Near the beginning of November, nixCraft posted this challenge on Mastodon, daring people to take the No NAT November challenge and disable IPv4 for the month, relying only on IPv6:
2300
Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL
This post investigates how we got from Wi-Fi Direct to AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware, what makes Wi-Fi Aware technically superior, and why this shift unlocks true cross-platform peer-to-peer connectivity for developers.
2301
2302
2303
Hell is a multi-threaded C++ program (2006)
What are threads? Every modern operating system has support for threads, and most programming environments provide some level of support for...
2304
Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout
The final report of the Expert Panel on the 28 April 2025 blackout in continental Spain and Portugal identifies the causes of the blackout and outlines recommendations to strengthen the resilience of Europe’s interconnected electricity system. It was prepared by a technical Expert Panel of 49 members, including…
2305
Exploitable vulnerabilities found in Kaspersky Anti-Virus
Posted by the notorious Tavis Ormandy.We’ve talked before about how we use Google scale to ...
2306
Hardening the Kernel in Android Oreo
News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.
2307
Beware of sudo on OS X
There's a little kerfuffle going on over on HN about a newly discovered local root exploit on OS X 10.10.5 , so I thought this might be a g...
2308
Fast and cheap bulk storage: using LVM to cache HDDs on SSDs
My attempt to create fast and cheap bulk storage by caching HDDs with SSDs on Linux, using standard lvmcache. Contains an introduction to LVM, RAID, and partitioning.
2309
Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster
DuckDB 2.0 alpha vs 1.5.5 on one laptop: recursive CTEs up to 90x, VARIANT 6x faster than JSON text, async I/O 2.4x on S3. What changes, and how to model data to get the speedup. | Reading time: 15 min read
2310
Your terminal is not a terminal: An Introduction to Streams
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.