Top all-time · #4409
Taras Glek
Personal blog · taras.glek.netaisystemsprogramming
Taras Glek writes Taras' Blog on AI, Perf, Hacks, a personal blog at taras.glek.net about ai, systems and programming. Since 2012, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 42 times, most often “Fast groq-hosted LLMs vs. browser responsiveness”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Taras Glek's blog for Mozilla and Firefox performance work, fsync and storage latency measurements, and the history of COM and Windows programming.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Theme PaperMod - https://github.com/adityatelange/hugo-PaperMod
Most-linked posts?
- Fast groq-hosted LLMs vs. browser responsiveness2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-19
- Laggy phones and misleading benchmarks2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-20
- Firefox's Optimized Zip Format2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-22
- GPT-ARIA: Integrating GPT-3 with Browser Using Accessibility API2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-03-30
- Create Missing RSS Feeds with LLMs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-04-27
What Hacker News says?
The title is "Why Google Pixel lags 10x more than Moto Z" but the content is just a microbenchmark of fsync() without anything resembling a measurement of UI lag or that the 10x slowdown in fsync() actually means a 10x (or any) increase in said lag. The author's previous blogpost ( http://taras.glek.net/post/Laggy-phones-and-misleading-bench... ) contends that 4K writes are a good proxy for phone lag, but has no evi…
Comment linking /post/Laggy-phones-and-misleading-benchmarks/
on “Why Google Pixel lags 10x more than Moto Z”Submitted Why Google Pixel lags 10x more than Moto Z as a story · 484 points
HN discussionGlad you asked! One of my favorite topics. ;) COM is essentially a formal way of using C++ vtables [1] from C and other languages, so you can create and consume components in any language, and call back and forth between them. It's a way of expressing a rational subset of how C++ classes work and format in memory, in a way that can be implemented in other languages. It was the outcome of the C / C++ / Visual Basic l…
Comment linking /blog/categories/decomtamination/
on “Visual Studio for Mac Preview”Submitted Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin? as a story · 406 points
HN discussionI agree re simplicity of the old way of doing things. There's another benefit that most cgi-bin systems had: lack of build step or exotic runtime requirements. Eg, you'd drop some html into public_html folder and an executable into cgi-bin dir. I would performance engineer some scripts into C++ binaries and just checkout the source & run make to produce binaries in-place. This approach made it easy to use local dev…
Comment linking /posts/cloudflare-pages-kind-of-amazing/
on “So long WordPress”Submitted Firefox's Optimized Zip Format as a story · 281 points
HN discussionThere is actually a technical term of art (two actually) for the process of removing XP/COM interfaces from Mozilla: "decomification" and "decomtamination", and another related term "outparamdelling". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20266627 >It certainly had a lot of problems and limitations, and OLE/ActiveX/DCOM/DirectX/etc took it way too far, then Mozilla XP/COM cloned it and also took it way too far (and t…
Comment linking /blog/categories/decomtamination/
on “Is there any code in Firefox (as of 2020) that comes from Netscape Navigator?”Submitted Maintaining sufficient free space with ZFS as a story · 124 points
HN discussionI see that you guys do auth using ssh https://github.com/picosh/ptun and generally use ssh identities heavily. I think you might wanna consider providing a vault alternative that's based on ssh identities too. Here is my draft implementation of this idea https://taras.glek.net/post/github-to-sops-lighter-weight-se... I wrote my crappy script in anger at how poorly passwords integrate with gitops workflows. It's just…
Comment linking /post/github-to-sops-lighter-weight-secret-management/
on “Pico.sh – Hacker Labs”Submitted Reading NFS at 25GB/s using FIO and libnfs as a story · 111 points
HN discussionThe behavior of fsync is a battle of OS developers and OEMs versus application and database developers. Gaming the implementation of fsync to do less than fully fsync makes benchmarks look amazing, improves user perceived latency, and reduces flash wear. On the other hand, it corrupts data - but that's rare, "the hardware is failing anyway", etc. That's how you end up with stuff like OS X's "no really, fsync" param…
Comment linking /post/Followup-on-Pixel-vs-Moto:fsync/
on “A way to do atomic writes”Submitted eBPF for tracing how Firefox uses page faults to load libraries as a story · 107 points
HN discussionWrote a blog post on your other discussion https://taras.glek.net/post/overlooked-hn-databases-that-pro...
Comment linking /post/overlooked-hn-databases-that-process-data-faster-than-memory-bandwidth/
on “An Empirical Evaluation of Columnar Storage Formats [pdf]”Submitted Focus and Context and LLMs as a story · 95 points
HN discussionFirst, Rust is a handful of people working on a research project. Electrolysis was "put on hold" because there were better ways to make Firefox a more responsive browser, now. That's projects snappy and supersnappy. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy and http://taras.glek.net/ and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=718121 -- the final bug being what I think will make Firefox a great browser ag…
Comment linking /
on “Mozilla brings back 64-bit builds of Firefox for Windows”Submitted Cost-Efficient Continuous Integration as a story · 59 points
HN discussionWhat I would find interesting (and have posted about in the past) is the story of how 16-bit Visual Basic VBX's became a success disaster, and how that related to the internal programming language wars going on at Microsoft at the time, and the migration from Win16=>Win32, and how the wildly successful yet disastrous COM/OLE/MFC/OCX/DCOM/ActiveX/ATL ecosystem came out of that, and how so many other projects like mTr…
Comment linking /blog/categories/decomtamination/
on “I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up”Submitted PSA: Eget That Executable from GitHub as a story · 47 points
HN discussion@vishnumenon, thanks for writing this up. I might do a followup blog on this, for now here is a comment :) This article is close to my heart as I've been working on craftcraft.org with similar perspective. 1. Chat UX Consolidation: I agree that having crappy chat UIs everywhere is very suboptimal. Perhaps having a complete UX as a component is another solution here. We took many months to get chatcraft.org from prot…
Comment linking /post/gpt-aria-experiment/
on “Language Model UXes in 2027”Submitted Laggy phones and misleading benchmarks as a story · 36 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Mozilla Amazon EC2 Usage Got 15X Cheaper in 8 Months as a story · 21 points
HN discussionSubmitted Show HN: GitHub-to-sops: Easy way to manage passwords/keys with GitHub and SOPS as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Optimized Zip Format: Reading Zip Files Quickly as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Create Missing RSS Feeds with LLMs as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Firefox's optimized zip format: reading zip files quickly as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Chatcraft.org: Developer-Focused Open Source ChatGPT as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted GPT-ARIA: Integrating GPT-3 with Browser Using Accessibility API as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Create Missing RSS Feeds with LLMs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted My blog is no longer hostage to some CSS tooling as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fast groq-hosted LLMs vs. browser jank as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
