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macOS command-line tools you might not know about
A comprehensive reference for advanced command-line utilities that provide unique macOS functionality.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 555 posts.
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The Cloud Computer
Announcing the world's first commercial cloud computer.
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Memory Allocation
A visual introduction to memory allocation.
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Zenbleed
If you remove the first word from the string "hello world" , what should the result be? This is the story of how we discovered that the answer could be your root password!
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Forking Chrome to render in a terminal
I wrote about forking Chrome to turn HTML to SVG two months ago, today we're going to do something similar by making it render into a terminal.
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Load Balancing
A bottom-up, animated guide to HTTP load balancing algorithms.
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Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
Amazon produces and delivers to customers world-class entertainment via Prime Video, Amazon MGM Studios, MGM+, Amazon Music, Audible, Wondery, Amazon Games, and Twitch. Amazon’s entertainment properties empower millions of customers around the world to enjoy a massive selection of the very best in…
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We reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100x
I’m going to cover a lot of ground in this post, so here’s the TLDR: We built a Twitter-scale Mastodon instance from scratch in only 10k lines of code. This is 100x less code than the ~1M lines Twi…
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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
The teeth are not the only problem
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Where does my computer get the time from?
This week I was in Rotterdam for a RIPE meeting . On Friday morning I gave a lightning talk called where does my computer get the time from? The RIPE meeting website has a copy of my slides and a video of the talk; this is a blogified low-res version of the slides with a rough and inexact transcript.
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We have used too many levels of abstractions
A big percentage of so-called experts today only know how to configure tools, but they understand nothing about how things work at the deeper level. This is a real challenge and a big problem for the future.
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I booted Linux 293k times in 21 hours
And it only took 21 hours. Linux 6.4 has a bug where it hangs on boot, but probably only 1 in 1000 boots (and rarer if using Intel hardware for some reason). It’s surprising to me that no one…
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Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3
Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
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ARM64 Linux Workstation
My personal website and blog
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Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
In this post I’ll attempt the fun stunt of designing a system that could serve the full production load of Twitter with most of the features intact on a single (very powerful) machine. I’ll start by showing off a Rust prototype of the core tweet distribution data structure handling 35x full load by fitting the hot set…
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“Clean” code, horrible performance
Many programming "best practices" taught today are performance disasters waiting to happen.
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Paving the Road to Vulkan on Asahi Linux
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
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A Heisenbug lurking in async Python
Textual is a TUI framework for Python, inspired by modern web development.
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Squeeze the hell out of the system you have
When complexity leaps are on the table, there’s usually also an opportunity to squeeze some extra juice out of the system you have. By tweaking the workload, tuning performance, or supplement…
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Rust std fs slower than Python? No, it's hardware
Achieving Data Freedom Through Open Source and Rust
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A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32
How a mistake of less than half a millimeter in a single part nearly brought down the world’s largest passenger aircraft.
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Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way
Daniel P. Gross is a computer software and hardware professional based in Toronto.
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The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux
Note: If you're here because you just want to watch Netflix on Asahi, install this (Edit: for Arch users, grab this . Fedora users can install the widevine-installer package), and then scroll down to the "Netflix-Specific Annoyances" section.
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Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
We’ve been working hard on making Firefox even faster and we’re extremely happy to report that this has resulted in an improvement in speed.
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Learn x86-64 assembly by writing a GUI from scratch
Most people think assembly is only to be used to write toy programs for learning purposes, or to write a highly optimized version of a specific function inside a codebase written in a high-level language.
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SQL Maxis: Why We Ditched RabbitMQ and Replaced It with a Postgres Queue
Embracing our SQL Maxi nature: how we ripped out RabbitMQ from our infrastructure and replaced it with a Postgres queue.
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Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough
Xe Iaso's personal website.
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Reptar
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…?
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Fast machines, slow machines
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…