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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 555 posts.
Hello and welcome back to The Cool Blog. I've been meaning to write more but I had these things called finals and then I had to move home for the summer and then I got addicted to Satisfactory again and yeah. Anyway I'm back and time for me to share a project of mine that I've been working on since like March.
Some possible reasons for 8-bit bytes
While playing Factorio the other day, I was struck by the many similarities with Apache Kafka.
A guide to help you setup your Linux work machine and configure it for a power users workflow
Explore common Linux virtual network interfaces, including Bridge, Bonded interface, VLAN, VXLAN, MACVLAN, IPVLAN, MACVTAP/IPVTAP, and more. Learn how to create and use them effectively for your
For some of us, the backend vs frontend discussion just doesn’t cut it. What do do, then?
Learn how CPUs work, and discover Apple’s underrated competitive advantage.
Today, the Manticore team is thrilled to announce the release of Manticore Search 6.
This year, the YJIT team has been working hard to improve and optimize YJIT. We’re proud to say that the version of YJIT to be included with Ruby 3.3 is leaps and bounds ahead of Ruby 3.2’s. It provides better performance across the board, while also warming up faster and using less memory. The 3.3 release is also…
How the Figma infrastructure team reduced potential instability by scaling to multiple databases
MMAP Databases = 💩
When the JPEG folks were working on image compression, they didn't create a better or faster LZ. Instead they developed new approaches. I se...
Yes, here at Old VCR we live in the past, when RISC Unix workstations still ruled the earth like large boxy tentaculous Cthulhus. Oh, sure, ...
Developers often believe that software performance follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the running time is spent in 20% of the code. Using this model, you can write most of your code without any care for performance and focus on the narrow pieces of code that are performance sensitive. Engineers like Casey Muratori…
People seem to think that writing a garbage collector is really hard, a deep magic understood by a few great sages and Hans Boehm (et al) . Well it’s not. In fact, it’s rather straight forward. I claim that the hardest part in writing a GC is writing the memory allocator, which is as hard to write as it is to look up…
I’m often surprised that people continually have fundamental misconceptions about how distributed systems behave. I myself shared many of these misconceptions, so I try not to demean or dismiss but rather educate and enlighten, hopefully while sounding less preachy than that just did. I continue to learn only by…
Pinterest's tech stack explained simply
A solution to the problem of the growing number of mount points and loopback devices in (Ubuntu) Linux.
Wayland is all the rage those days. Distributions left and right switch to it, many readers of my previous article on writing a X11 GUI from scratch in x86_64 assembly asked for a follow-up article about Wayland, and I now run Wayland on my desktop. So here we go, let's write a (very simple) GUI program with Wayland…
This vulnerability allows a physically-present attacker to control the full disk encryption unlock process and gain complete access to decrypted content in some cases where a TPM, dracut and Clevis are used.
Suppose you’re connected to a remote host with SSH and after a while the SSH session goes stale. The terminal is unresponsive and no keypress seem to take effect. There might be something with the network, the remote host is restarting or maybe your machine has been in hibernation, there could be multiple reasons for…
A dive into what x86 instruction are decoded into various processors, to determine the truth of the idea that they're just RISC-like internally.
How to have fun with the world’s most important free software project "Functional, free and secure by default", OpenBSD remains a crucial yet largely unacknowledged player in the open source field. This talk aims to highlight the project's signature security features and development practices -- razor sharp focus on…
The personal blog of Thomas Steiner
Yet another JDK release that is on track - JDK 20 GA is almost here . Another opportunity to summarize changes and improvements in Hotspot´s stop-the-world garbage collectors for the JDK 20 release.
