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technovelty
Personal blog · technovelty.orgsystemsprogramming
technovelty is a personal blog at technovelty.org about systems and programming. Since 2007, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “The quickest way to do nothing”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link technovelty posts as practical references on Linux and build tooling, including the stamp idiom for Make and separating debug symbols from shared libraries.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The quickest way to do nothing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-07-29
- PLT and GOT – the key to code sharing and dynamic libraries (2011)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-03-31
- Position Independent Code and x86-64 libraries2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-01-04
What Hacker News says?
It has an interesting performance impact on calls to dynamic libraries. One alternative approach would be to avoid the indirect calls through not using '-fPIC --shared' when building shared libraries but '-mcmodel=large --shared'. This causes the relocations to happen at the direct calls and not through a GOT. The obvious drawback that it effectively disables sharing code in memory, it would still allow sharing code…
Comment linking /c/position-independent-code-and-x86-64-libraries.html
on “LLVM patch to fix half of Spectre attack”Submitted What actually happens when you plug in a USB device? (2007) as a story · 92 points
HN discussionYou may want to consider using 'stamp files'. These are just empty files created via 'touch' to serve as a timestamp that Make can use to determine if a target needs to be rebuilt if the target doesn't correspond to an actual file in the build directory. This is useful for build targets such as running docker-compose build. See https://www.technovelty.org/tips/the-stamp-idiom-with-make.h...
Comment linking /tips/the-stamp-idiom-with-make.html
on “A simple makefile is a unicorn”Submitted Playing with the x86 PMU as a story · 19 points
HN discussionWhile not as straightforward as on Windows (which isn't developer oriented), it's possible on Linux and standard on most distributions (just look at all the -dbg packages of debian-based distributions). A little googling found these instructions involving objcopy to separate debug symbols: http://www.technovelty.org/code/debug-info.html
Comment linking /code/debug-info.html
on “Sorry state of dynamic libraries on Linux”Submitted VMware and GPL – it's about api boundaries, not copy-paste as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why symbol visibility is good as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted PLT and GOT – the key to code sharing and dynamic libraries (2011) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Zuul and Ansible in OpenStack CI as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Position Independent Code and x86-64 libraries as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Position Independent Code and x86-64 libraries as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Image building for OpenStack CI – Minimal images, big effort as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted PLT and GOT – the key to code sharing and dynamic libraries as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted PLT and GOT – the key to code sharing and dynamic libraries (2011) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exploring $ORIGIN in RPATH (2011) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Quickest Way to Do Nothing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Quickest Way to do Nothing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The quickest way to do nothing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What actually happens when you plug in a USB device? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
