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The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
Teens wrote me a secret. I found them.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 569 posts.
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Engineering for Slow Internet
How to minimize user frustration in Antarctica.
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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections . Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds , making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't…
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It's always TCP_NODELAY
The first thing I check when debugging latency issues in distributed systems is whether TCP_NODELAY is enabled. And it’s not just me. Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option, suggesting that the default behavior is wrong, and perhaps…
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NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules
With the R515 driver, NVIDIA released a set of Linux GPU kernel modules in May 2022 as open source with dual GPL and MIT licensing. The initial release targeted datacenter compute GPUs…
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Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities
macOS comes with a lot of built-in utilities. Here's a list of some that I find interesting.
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Maestro: A Linux-compatible kernel in Rust
Maestro is a Unix-like kernel and operating system written from scratch in Rust
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QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
QNX is changing the game for engineers and software developers, providing free access to QNX software and resources for non-commercial use.
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Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison
NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?
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A good day to trie-hard: saving compute 1% at a time
Pingora handles 35M+ requests per second, so saving a few microseconds per request can translate to thousands of dollars saved on computing costs. In this post, we share how we freed up over 500 CPU cores by optimizing one function and announce trie-hard, the open source crate that we created to do it.
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Boeing whistleblower: MAX 9 production line has "enormous volume of defects"
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…
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In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)
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…
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SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud
A blog by and for database architects.
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Sudo for Windows
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
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MLow: Meta's low bitrate audio codec
At Meta, we support real-time communication (RTC) for billions of people through our apps, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. We are working to make RTC accessible by providing a high-q…
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Linux/4004: booting Linux on Intel 4004 for fun, art, and no profit
Dmitry.GR: Slowly booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit
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M4 Mac mini's efficiency
I had to pause some of my work getting a current-gen AMD graphics card running on the Pi 5 and testing a 192-core AmpereOne server to quickly post on the M4's efficiency. I expected M4 to be better than M1/M2 (I haven't personally tested M3), and I hoped it would at least match the previous total-system-power…
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How Figma's databases team lived to tell the scale
Our nine month journey to horizontally shard Figma’s Postgres stack, and the key to unlocking (nearly) infinite scalability.
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Extreme Pi Boot Optimization
🚀 3.5 sec to Linux userspace code
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John Carmack on inlined code (2014)
(Here begins a comment written by John Carmack in 2014, about an email he sent to a programmers’ mailing list in 2007.)
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How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner
A high-level overview of how PostgreSQL stores data on disk, covering segments, pages and more.
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WebP: The WebPage Compression Format
I want to provide a smooth experience to my site visitors, so I work on accessibility and ensure it works without JavaScript enabled. I care about page load time because some pages contain large illustrations, so I minify my HTML. But one thing makes turning my blog light as a feather a pain in the ass.
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How much faster are the Gnome 46 terminals?
I use a hardware latency tester to measure how much the VTE-based terminals improved from GNOME 45 to GNOME 46.
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