Topics /
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 542 posts.
Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo:
Cloudflare suffered a service outage on November 18, 2025. The outage was triggered by a bug in generation logic for a Bot Management feature file causing many Cloudflare services to be affected.
After over two decades, players are now forbidden from flying a seaplane, all thanks to undefined code behavior.
The majority of the traffic on the web is from bots. For the most part, these bots are used to discover new content. These are RSS Feed readers, search engines crawling your content, or nowadays AI bo
I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are…
A new generation of collaborative software that allows users to retain ownership of their data.
In 2020, Apple released the M1 with a custom GPU. We got to work reverse-engineering the hardware and porting Linux. Today, you can run Linux on a range of M1 and M2 Macs, with almost all hardware working: wireless, audio, and full graphics acceleration.
What I've learned from ten years working on projects like this
The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and hasbeen in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing,jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to anend. This post briefly desc...
By examining the limits of reasonable user behavior and embracing imperfection for users who go beyond it, we can continue to provide service that meets the expectations of users without sacrificing scalability of the system.
Cloudflare experienced a significant traffic outage on December 5, 2025, starting approximately at 8:47 UTC. The incident lasted approximately 25 minutes before resolution. We are sorry for the impact that it caused to our customers and the Internet. The incident was not caused by an attack and was due to…
Adventures in programming, hardware, DSP, and chiptune
...so the malware would finally shut up and run
During the winter of 2024, I restored an IBM PS/1 486-DX2 66Mhz, "Mini-Tower", model 2168. It was the computer I always wanted as a teenager but could never afford. Words cannot do justice to the joy I felt while working on this machine.
So I was uh, downloading some linux isos, like usual. It was going slowly, so I opened up the Trackers tab in qBittorrent and saw the following:
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
/dev/null is web scale
If you are reading this message, the experiment below is still ongoing. This page was served to you by a real Nintendo Wii.
Date: 2025-01-26 Git: https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00016-wayland-input-latency.md
AWS’s Sergey Melnik, along with HN commenters matashii and Ants Aasma, have identified the cause of Long Fork in PostgreSQL clusters. As described a 2013 mailing list post , the order in which a PostgreSQL primary makes transactions visible is determined by an in-memory lock. Secondaries, however, make transactions…
Fil-C uses a parallel concurrent on-the-fly grey-stack Dijkstra accurate non-moving garbage collector called FUGC (Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector). You can find the source code for the collector itself in fugc.c , though be warned, that code cannot possibly work without lots of support logic in the rest of the…
When it comes to infrastructure engineering, building a data center is probably closer to building a house than to deploying a Terraform stack.
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.
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.
Why do compilers love xor-ing registers so much?
Learn why Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY doesn't scale for high-throughput use cases and what architectural alternatives Recall.ai uses in production.
On many Unix-based operating systems, rsync is a command line tool for transferring and synchronizing files on a computer, either between storage attached directly to the computer or between anothe…
Why you should just use Postgres instead of Kafka for small-scale message queuing and pub-sub patterns. Benchmarks and practical tests included.
Liwei Guo, Zhi Li, Sheldon Radford, Jeff Watts
