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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,935 posts.
Due to some lucky circumstances, I recently had the chance to appear in one of the biggest German gaming podcasts, Stay Forever, to talk about the technology of RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999). It was …
We have a CPU mystery! We found a way to cause some processors to enter a glitch state where the normal rules don’t apply, but what does that mean…?
Well, that was unexpected. I recorded a couple of crappy videos in 5 minutes, posted them on a Twitter thread, and went viral with 8.8K likes at this point. I really could not have predicted that, given that I’ve been posting what-I-believe-is interesting content for years and… nothing, almost-zero interest. Now that…
By: John Blair, Netflix Partner Engineering
This post introduces paging, a very common memory management scheme that we will also use for our operating system. It explains why memory isolation i…
When it comes to infrastructure engineering, building a data center is probably closer to building a house than to deploying a Terraform stack.
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
A reader at respected airline industry site Leeham News offered a comment that suggests they have access to Boeing’s internal quality control systems, and shares details of what they saw regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 9 flown by Alaska Airlines that had a door plug detach inflight, causing rapid decompression of the…
I’m not one prone to knee-jerk reactions, but I’m also not one to sit about idly without considering alternatives. So the first thing I did after the Apple ...
Late last year, I started experiencing some unusual intermittent connection issues on my Desktop. In general, I had a stable connection with average latency; however, at (seemingly) random times throughout the week, I would start experiencing sudden 2000ms+ latency spikes every couple of seconds.
About a month ago I moved to Stockholm, Sweden and started working at Spotify . A month before starting I was asked about my preferred setup for working. Having used OS X for year as the primary operating system at work the choice was clear, I wanted to go back to Linux, in this case to Debian to be exact.
Learn how we tracked a performance bottleneck to a 15-year-old Git function and fixed it, leading to enhanced efficiency that supports more robust backup strategies and can reduce risk.
Playing Witcher 3, a GPU-intensive game on a 2015 fanless Macbook
Writing assembly language is something best left for the experts. To write code that runs directly on your microprocessor you need to know how memory segmentation works, what the intended use of each register is, how codes executes in real and protected modes and much, much more. And, of course, modern compilers will…
Wave is a $1.7B company with 70 engineers 1 whose product is a CRUD app that adds and subtracts numbers. In keeping with this, our architecture is a standard CRUD app architecture, a Python monolith on top of Postgres. Starting with a simple architecture and solving problems in simple ways where possible has allowed…
Last November I went to an IETF meeting for the first time. The IETF is an interesting place; it seems to be about 1/3 maintenance grunt wo...
A blog by and for database architects.
An agent harness is a piece of software that provides an environment for an AI model to operate within.
I've had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices…
Introducing Sudo for Windows We're excited to announce the release of Sudo for Windows in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052! Sudo for Windows is a
A collection of 150+ nifty tips and tricks for macOS, for both system features like the Dock, Spotlight, and Mission Control and built-in apps like Safari, Mail, and Photos.
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
Instructors of “Introduction to programming” courses know that students are willing to blame the failures of their programs on anything. Sorting routine discards half of the data? “That might be a Windows virus!” Binary search always fails? “The Java compiler is acting funny today!” More experienced programmers know…
[Note: there have been several developments in this space since thisarticle was published. See A Tail Calling Interpreter For Python (And Other Updates) for...
