Best of 2024

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2024. 399 posts.

Systems & Performance
335

ARM64EC (and ARM64X) Explained

ARM64EC (and ARM64X) Explained Probably the most confused looks I get from other developers when I discuss Windows and ARM64 is when I used the term " ARM64EC ". They ask is the same thing as ARM64? Is it a different instruction set than ARM64? How can you tell if an application is or ARM64 ARM64EC?

339

X is justifiably slow (2022)

I regularly hear or read statements like this: “X is slow but this is to be expected because it needs to do a lot of work”. It can be said about an application or a component in a larger system, and can refer to other resources that aren’t time. I often find these profoundly unhelpful as they depend much more on the…

347

Compilers are too smart

Last week I noticed some unexpected assembly code in a function calling std::unordered_map::find (yes, I know, friends don’t let friends use STL, but that is a topic for another discussion). I decided to investigate a bit and it turned out to be quite a journey. It was a Clang compiler, ARM-based platform, I will use…

355

NixOS is not reproducible

Okay, sorry for the clickbait. NixOS is not reproducible according to the Reproducible Builds definition. I keep reading people making this claim repeatedly on orange-site, even LWN.net made a similar claim when writing about Nix and Guix earlier this week.1 Along with their recently launched wiki. So, what is the…

357

Making Your Connection Bad

This is directly inspired by Engineering for Slow Internet. I figured I’d give running with dogshit internet on my desktop and phone a go to see how poorly (or well!) specific applications behave. This is not an in-depth review of the behavior, but just my general impressions running for a few hours on 200kbit…