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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 190 posts.

2013
1

Megafail

In case you’ve been living under a rock the past few days, Kim Dotcom (of Megaupload infamy) has launched his new cloud storage site, Mega. Mega has an impressive sales pitch, promising secure cloud storage where only the user has the key to decrypt his or her files, and the encryption and decryption happens securely…

8

Multiprocess Firefox

Since this January, David Anderson and I have been working on making Firefox use multiple processes. Tom Schuster (evilpie on IRC) joined us as an intern this summer, and Felipe Gomes, Mark Hammond…

11

Booting to Rust

A couple nights ago I was looking over the UEFI spec, and I realized it shouldn't be too hard to write UEFI applications in Rust. It turns out, you can, and her…

18

ARM64 and You

Ever since the iPhone 5S was announced a couple of weeks ago , the world of tech journalism has been filled with massive quantities of misinformation . Unfortunately, good information takes time, and the world of tech journalism is more about speed than accuracy. Today, as suggested by a variety of readers, I'm going…

21

Fish shell 2.0

fish 2.0 is now released! fish is a fully-equipped command line shell (like bash or zsh) that is smart and user-friendly. fish supports powerful features like syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, and tab completions that just work, with nothing to learn or configure.

23

Communicating Sequential Processes

With the arrival of core.async , ClojureScript provides a powerful advantage over other popular compile to JavaScript languages like CoffeeScript , Dart , and TypeScript . These languages fail to address the single largest source of incidental complexity for any sizeable client side application - concurrency. In my…

24

Call me maybe: Cassandra

Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in…

29

How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

C is, today, a unique programming language. Surprisingly few people can really program in C and yet many of us have quite strong opinions about it. Buffer overflows, stack smashing, integer overflows — C has many well publicised flaws, and these terms are often bandied about confidently, even by those unfamiliar with…

30

When Haskell Is Not faster than C

This article is in response to an earlier one comparing Haskell and C, which made the claim that Haskell beats out C when it comes to speed. On a Hacker News thread I made the bold claim that the C code is rife with problems and that it is tempting to fix it.