Top all-time · #1538
eklitzke.org
Personal blog · eklitzke.org · on HN as eklitzkeprogrammingsystems
eklitzke.org is a personal blog at eklitzke.org about programming and systems. Since 2016, 47 different Hacker News readers have linked it 111 times, most often “The cult of dd (2017)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link eklitzke.org for Linux and systems posts: dd and the 'cult of dd', uninterruptible sleep, PATH_MAX, the halting problem and TSP complexity. Commenters cite it as a reference.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The cult of dd (2017)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-03-17
- Uninterruptible Sleep4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-03-26
- Lobotomizing Gnome3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-05-29
- Misunderstanding Mlock(2) and Mlockall(2) (2015)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-04-02
- PATH_MAX Is Tricky3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-04-25
- How Many Bitcoins Did Satoshi Nakamoto Mine?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-12-07
- All About Linkers3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-02-15
- Stdout Buffering3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-12-23
- Unexpected places you can and can’t use null bytes2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-02-01
- C String Literals Are Lvalues2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-05-04
What Hacker News says?
I realize I'm replying six days later - but I can't help mentioning that the "dd situation" is even crazier than it first appears: you can just use `cp foo.iso /dev/sdb` or `cat > /dev/sdb`. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/189091/220387 https://eklitzke.org/the-cult-of-dd
Comment linking /the-cult-of-dd
on “Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust”Submitted Bash $* and $@ (2017) as a story · 316 points
HN discussionAnd I find your comment to be a super-annoying combination of pedantic and mostly wrong. I'm not going to go through every example but just pick a few: > > For example, in C I'd be tempted to reuse a buffer allocated for one purpose for another purpose later (a technique known as HEARTBLEED). > You can do that in Java (with byte arrays) or in Common Lisp, so what is the point here? It is not practice in Java, Lisp n…
Comment linking /path-max-is-tricky
on “Speed of Rust vs. C”Submitted The cult of dd (2017) as a story · 289 points
HN discussionJulia Evans' blog is one of my favorites! It was a big inspiration for starting my own blog ( https://andythemoron.com ). I also love High Scalability and Dan Luu's blog which have been mentioned in other comments. I "follow" several which are mostly defunct, but in terms of blogs that still feature active updates: Evan Klitze's blog: lots of topics around Linux, C++, etc. https://eklitzke.org/ Sutter's Mill: lots o…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow?”Submitted How to Host Your Own Private Git Repositories as a story · 271 points
HN discussionhttps://eklitzke.org/ http://www.onebigfluke.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow?”Submitted The Cult of DD as a story · 269 points
HN discussionCult of dd : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13896675 / https://eklitzke.org/the-cult-of-dd
Comment linking /the-cult-of-dd
on “Useless Use of "dd" (2015)”Submitted Lobotomizing Gnome as a story · 225 points
HN discussionhttps://eklitzke.org/path-max-is-tricky The Linux kernel defines upper limits for NAME_MAX (255) and PATH_MAX (4096). The glibc doesn't enforce this limit because it was originally written to run on GNU HURD which I guess doesn't have these limits. But systemd only runs on glibc on Linux. So I don't see why it doesn't at least sanity check the length of absolute paths with PATH_MAX...
Comment linking /path-max-is-tricky
on “size_t-to-int vulnerability in Linux’s filesystem layer”Submitted How Tail Call Optimization Works as a story · 220 points
HN discussionhttps://eklitzke.org/uninterruptible-sleep > If the process is in uninterruptible sleep then the process can’t be interrupted, which will cause the strace process itself to hang forever. Remarkably, it appears that the ptrace(2) system call is itself uninterruptible, which means that if this happens you may not be able to kill the strace process! Everything about this is broken and makes no sense. The Night Watch is…
Comment linking /uninterruptible-sleep
on “Show HN: A “living” Linux process with no memory”Submitted In Defense of C++ as a story · 196 points
HN discussionFor anyone who was wondering, I found a post explaining why threads can be in "uninterruptible sleep" in the first place: https://eklitzke.org/uninterruptible-sleep
Comment linking /uninterruptible-sleep
on “Show HN: A “living” Linux process with no memory”Submitted Goroutines, Nonblocking I/O, and Memory Usage as a story · 182 points
HN discussionI believe that when a file is mmap'd a page table is created for it in the . As you perform read/write on the file a fault loads the actual entries into that page table. As pages can be mapped they so too can be unmapped under pressure, without that falling back to swap (since it is already a file backed map, you wouldn't swap a file backed map to a different file after all). There are a few relevant bits to this. Y…
Comment linking /mlock-and-mlockall
on “Serving a high-performance blog solely from memory, using Rust”Submitted Beware of strncpy and strncat as a story · 108 points
HN discussionGah, another one of those promotional posts about Rust. More seriously, the large enough Noto Sans font with a hint of extra weight renders so gorgeous in Firefox (it's even bearable in Chrome!). I wish all webpages were as readable. As for the content, well, going back to: https://eklitzke.org/c++-java-go-and-rust I think the problem of the author is that he doesn't realize it's possible to do much better than C++.…
Comment linking /c++-java-go-and-rust
on “In Defense of C++”Submitted X86 Register Encoding as a story · 100 points
HN discussionThis is actually an incredibly frustrating thing -- when doing disk i/o, the process goes into an uninterruptible sleep state[0]. So if your shell is doing some tab completion that goes into an uninterruptible sleep, there's no escape sequence you can send it to cancel that operation. Where I've seen this be the most vexing is in AWS if an EBS volume dies (surprisingly more frequent of an occurrence than you'd think…
Comment linking /uninterruptible-sleep
on “Git ls-files is Faster Than Fd and Find”Submitted Efficient File Copying on Linux as a story · 95 points
HN discussionI just read up on this. If what I read is true, TSP is NP-hard not NP complete. You can’t trivially prove that the solution is optimum. Reference: https://eklitzke.org/the-traveling-salesman-problem-is-not-n...
Comment linking /the-traveling-salesman-problem-is-not-np-complete
on “Ant Colony Optimization Visualization for the Travelling Salesman Problem”Submitted Bitcoin Transaction Malleability as a story · 81 points
HN discussionThis isn't exactly what you're talking about, but I found this blog post to be an interesting exploration of some related ideas: https://eklitzke.org/the-halting-problem
Comment linking /the-halting-problem
on “Gödel's Completeness Theorem”Submitted Unix System Call Timeouts as a story · 76 points
HN discussionGood addition! Here are some more: https://ferd.ca https://blog.filippo.io https://lethain.com http://movingpackets.net https://www.integralist.co.uk https://peter.bourgon.org/blog https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog https://begriffs.com https://mijailovic.net http://tatiyants.com http://blog.pentestbegins.com (seems down right now?) https://kalzumeus.com/archive http://blog.stephenwolfram.com https://paragonie.co…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are some of the tech blogs you follow regularly?”Submitted PATH_MAX Is Tricky as a story · 67 points
HN discussionAdding a few more that helped me to learn few things, Evan Klitzke - https://eklitzke.org Eli Bendersky - https://eli.thegreenplace.net Bartosz Milewski - https://bartoszmilewski.com Jeff Preshing - https://preshing.com Robert O'Callahan - https://robert.ocallahan.org Marek's idea of the day - https://idea.popcount.org Chris Wellons - https://nullprogram.com Andrej Karpathy - https://karpathy.github.io/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are the blogs from which you learned most”Submitted Declaring C String Constants as a story · 66 points
HN discussion
