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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
You only need to learn a little bit of queueing theory before you start getting that ecstatic “everything is connected!” high that good math always evokes. So many damn things follow th…
It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that…
code { white-space : pre-wrap !important; } This article is tightly scoped to cover one topic with specific, actionable advice: How to configure...
Details for Ghostscript's new PDF interpreter
My last article about generic data structures in C was written to set the stage for today’s topic: A data structure with constant time indexing, stable pointers, and works well with arena allocators. Its been independently discovered by multiple programmers over the years and so goes by different names. A 2001 paper…
What do you do when libc is your bottleneck? If the total runtime of your process is under 10ms, most of this time (depending on your hardware) is spent waiting for the linker and C runtime to set things up. If you compare this to the Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know , it falls right above "disk seek" and…
FortiMail Workspace Security secures user-facing apps from advanced threats that target Email, Browsers, Collaboration Tools and Cloud Storage Apps.
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Docker is a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, a 12-company reference architecture for securing AI agents, built around four governance questions.
I’m a connoisseur of failure. I love reading about engineering failures of all forms and, unsurprisingly, I’m particularly interested in data center faults. It’s not that I delight in engineering failures. My interest is driven by believing that the more faults we all understand, the more likely we can engineer…
Keeping CALM: when distributed consistency is easy Hellerstein & Alvaro, arXiv 2019 The CALM conjecture (and later theorem) was first introduced to the world in a 2010 keynote talk at PODS. Beh…
An RTL performance erratum in the Apple M3 Neural Engine throttles DRAM weight streaming throughput down to 17–19 GB/s from the nominal 45–60 GB/s, whenever the total weight size is an integer multiple of 1 MiB, which currently affects 7 of ANEMLL ’s 15 models. Avoiding the problematic path in the kernel DMA engine's…
For a recent project I've been working on, I wanted to include a graph showing the relationships between different artists on Spotify. Spotify provides the data directly from their API, and I had everything set up to pull it for a user's top artists and into the browser.
The latest trend in AI is that larger natural language models provide better accuracy; however, larger models are difficult to train because of cost, time, and ease of code integration. Microsoft is releasing an open-source library called DeepSpeed, which vastly advances large model training by improving scale, speed…
Are you confused about whether to use LXC or Docker for your containerization needs? This article compares the two container platforms in terms of ...
From time to time I’m toying with the idea to give a lecture to newcomers in the IT industry (systems or software engineers). Here are some of the points that I would include in it: Human fa…
Introducing kv, a statically allocated key/value server.
I keep getting a lot of private emails about my previous post about the latest status of the Linux kernel patches to resolve both the Meltdown and …
The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
While deploying Precision Time Protocol (PTP) at Meta, we’ve developed a simplified version of the protocol (Simple Precision Time Protocol – SPTP), that can offer the same level of clock syn…
ICU gets Unicode right and pays for it. This post shows a different approach: fold-safe windows, SIMD probes, and verifiers for fast UTF‑8 search.
We're open sourcing our programmatic low-level container runtime, Styrolite
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I’ve long since been a die-hard BeOS fan and have been running the open-source recreation Haiku for many years. I think it’s interesting to explore the “alternative OS” world and consider some great ideas that for whatever reason never caught on elsewhere. The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative…
In part one of this series we introduced the idea of a message log, touched on why it’s useful, and discussed the storage mechanics behind it. In part two, we discuss data replication. We have our log. We know how to write data to it and read it back as well as how data is persisted. The caveat to this is, although we…
