Top all-time · #746
Gustavo Duarte
Personal blog · duartes.orgprogrammingsystems
Gustavo Duarte writes Mi casa, su casa, a personal blog at duartes.org about programming and systems. Since 2008, 87 different Hacker News readers have linked it 117 times, most often “What your computer does while you wait”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (29) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Gustavo Duarte's blog for illustrated, in-depth explanations of computers and operating systems, especially Linux memory management and what a computer does while you wait.
- Recommended for · 16 comments
- Called awesome and excellent, clear, readable and detailed; figures and illustrations called nice; a good summary.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 29 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- What your computer does while you wait9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2008-12-01
- Anatomy of a Program in Memory (2009)5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2014-11-20
- How The Kernel Manages Your Memory5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2009-02-04
- Best of Gustavo Duarte5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-01-04
- Page Cache, the Affair Between Memory and Files5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2009-02-11
- Anatomy of a Program in Memory4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-01-27
- Lucky to be a Programmer4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-07-15
- First Recorded Usage of "Hacker"4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-08-28
- How Computers Boot Up (2008)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-07-15
- How a computer boots up3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2008-06-11
What Hacker News says?
http://stevehanov.ca/blog/ -- Updates infrequently. Very good programming articles. http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/ -- Updates infrequently. Good articles on Linux and Programming. Start here: http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/best-of http://catonmat.net -- He doesn't update much anymore since he's working on his startup but the archives are still good. Mostly unix tools and CompSci stuff IIRC. http://chneukirchen.or…
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/best-of
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted What Does an Idle CPU Do? as a story · 563 points
HN discussionGustavo Duarte's (not to be confused with Androider Matias Duarte) blog posts are awesome. I still highly recommend his 2009 in-depth review of how the Linux kernel manages memory: http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/how-the-kernel-manages-...
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/how-the-kernel-manages-your-memory/
on “What Does an Idle CPU Do?”Submitted How a computer boots up as a story · 245 points
HN discussionGustavo Duartes has a really great blog[1] about kernels and low-level development, with Linux on x86/amd64 being the reference. Here[2] is the one where he goes into CPU rings and kernel- versus user-mode. 1. http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/archives/ 2. http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/cpu-rings-privilege-and...
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/cpu-rings-privilege-and-protection/
on “Writing a Simple Linux Kernel Module”Submitted How The Kernel Manages Your Memory as a story · 191 points
HN discussionAfter a little investigation[1][2], it seems things get weird with an OS, as would be expected with virtual memory, et al. [1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16360620/find-out-whethe... [2] - http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/anatomy-of-a-program-in...
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/anatomy-of-a-program-in-memory/
on “How JavaScript works: memory management and common memory leaks”Submitted Anatomy of a Program in Memory as a story · 134 points
HN discussionThere is a book writen by Paul Graham, creator of HN: Hackers and Painters[1] And there is one tradition to call a hacker to someone who hacks(with software and hardware)[2], doing clever and/or ugly things, and that is not exactly to be a programmer (and also not exactly a security breaker, the other tradition for the hacker name[3]) I think that following the first tradition, the name of the site is well deserved.…
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of-hacker/
on “Ask HN: Non-technical readers of HN, why are you here?”Submitted Anatomy of a Program in Memory (2009) as a story · 129 points
HN discussionHere are other resources that I'm tracking: http://www.sal.ksu.edu/faculty/tim/ossg/index.html http://joelgompert.com/OS/ http://www.csi.ucd.ie/staff/jcarthy/home/alp/alp-05.pdf http://www.superfrink.net/athenaeum/ http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/html/oskit-www.html http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/how-computers-boot-up/ http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/kernel-boot-process/ http://www.ibm.com/developerwork…
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/kernel-boot-process/
on “Writing a simple operating system from scratch (2010) [pdf]”Submitted Linux internals as a story · 119 points
HN discussionOne of my favorite writeups on this topic is Gustavo Duarte's "What Your Computer Does While You Wait" http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does...
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait
on “Latency numbers every programmer should know”Submitted Tail Calls, Optimization, and ES6 as a story · 95 points
HN discussionNice article/blog post from 2008. If you want to keep reading, the next article is http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/kernel-boot-process
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/kernel-boot-process
on “How a computer boots up”Submitted Anatomy of a Program in Memory as a story · 81 points
HN discussionNo. ASM is just a slightly easier mnemonic version of the raw machine language. All software basically compiles down to this form. The OS functions are provided here. The "game" is just an application in the OS (kinda). The BIOS provides whatever the OS needs to hook into to use the hardware. Here's a high-level overview of how this works http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/how-computers-boot-up/ OS's don't need to…
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/how-computers-boot-up/
on “Floppy Bird: A Flappy Bird clone in 16-bit x86 assembly”Submitted Feynman, Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering as a story · 67 points
HN discussionDramatically slower. RAM latency is measured in nanoseconds. SSD latency is measured in microseconds. Your CPU already thinks RAM is slow. http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does... http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13379_na/13379...
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait
on “This is what 864GB of RAM looks like now”Submitted Cache Organization in Intel CPUs (2009) as a story · 60 points
HN discussionThat's not true. I'm all in favour of our beloved eponymous usage, but the earliest known occurrence of "hacker" did have to do with breaking into forbidden systems. http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of...
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of-hacker
on “Reuters totally clueless about the meaning of "hacking"”Submitted Lucky to be a Programmer as a story · 60 points
HN discussionAll great reads: http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/best-of I've never heard of this guy, but I like him already. Anybody that can produce documentation of this level of quality for a relatively advanced codebase is a good person to have committing, or even just hanging around.
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/best-of
on “How The Kernel Manages Your Memory”- tb · 2008-04-04
Submitted New Languages Considered Harmful: "Learning new languages is a waste of time." as a story · 53 points
HN discussion I went back and forth on whether use read() or fread() in my example, and I wasn't sure which to choose. For the purpose of this example, I don't think there is a functional difference between them. In current Linux, I'm pretty sure both of them use the same underlying page cache. fread() adds a small amount of management overhead, but read() does just as much system level buffering. mmap() uses the same cache, but…
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/page-cache-the-affair-between-memory-and-files
on “On Building A Stupidly Fast Graph Database”Submitted Richard Feynman’s Modest Science (and fake teaching) as a story · 49 points
HN discussionGustavo Duarte : Lucky to be a Programmer http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/lucky-to-be-a-programme...
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/lucky-to-be-a-programmer
on “Ask HN: What are the most inspirational blog posts you've ever read?”Submitted Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900 as a story · 47 points
HN discussionDoes every programmer really need to know the physics behind dynamic ram? What every programmer should know is the latency of the various memory types (cache, RAM, virtual) and their respective sizes. Here's a nice graphic: http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does...
Comment linking /gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait
on “What every programmer should know about memory”Submitted Anatomy of a Program in Memory (2009) as a story · 46 points
HN discussion
