frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Tailslayer: Library for reducing tail latency in RAM reads

https://github.com/LaurieWired/tailslayer
31•hasheddan•3h ago

Comments

shaicoleman•2h ago
* Announcement [1]

* Video [2]

1. https://x.com/lauriewired/status/2041566601426956391 (https://xcancel.com/lauriewired/status/2041566601426956391)

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKbgulTp3FE

jeffbee•1h ago
This readme, this header do not seem to discuss in any way the tradeoff, which is that you're paying by the same factor with median latency to buy lower tail latency. Nobody thinks of a load as taking 800 cycles but that is the baseline load latency here.

Also, having sacrificed my own mental health to watch the disgustingly self-promoting hour-long video that announces this small git commit, I can confidently say that "Graviton doesn't have any performance counters" is one of the wrongest things I've heard in a long time.

Overall, I give it an F.

Anyway if you want to hide memory refresh latency, IBM zEnterprise is your platform. It completely hides refresh latency by steering loads to the non-refreshing bank, and it only costs half the space, not up to 92% of your space like this technique.

PunchyHamster•1h ago
The video was about how rowhammer works, the lib was byproduct.
lauriewired•59m ago
Nope, there isn’t a tradeoff; median latency isn’t affected. I don’t think you understand the code. The p50 is identical between a single read and the hedged strategy.

The clflush is there because the technique targets data that will miss the cache anyway. If your working set fits in L1, you don’t need this.

Also, AWS Graviton instances absolutely do not expose per-channel memory controller counter PMUs. That’s why you have to use timing-based channel discovery.

The IBM z-system is neat! But my technique will work on commodity hardware in userspace, and you can easily only sacrifice half the space if you accept 2-way instead of 8+ way hedging. It’s entirely up to you how many channel copies you want to use.

Your reply was quite rude, but I hope this is informative.

hedgehog•54m ago
I was just trying to reconcile his reply with the charts. Have you tested how this scales down for smaller systems, as one might find in on the management side of a network switch?
jeffbee•35m ago
I won't be tone-policed by a person who is clearly trying to mislead and confuse people. I leave it to the other HNers to read your benchmark code and see for themselves that it is an exercise in absurdity, a work-around for its own library that doesn't measure anything other than with N threads, because of the laws of probability, this technique of reading timestamps as fast as possible and cramming them into a vector yields lower measurements with higher N.
ysleepy•59m ago
Loved the details about how memory access actually maps addresses to channels, ranks, blocks and whatever, this is rarely discussed.

Not sure how this works for larger data structures, but my first thought was that this should be implemented as some microcode or instruction.

Most computation is not thaat jitter sensitive, perception is not really in the nano to microsecond scale, but maybe a cool gadget for like dtrace or interrupt handers etc.

jagged-chisel•32m ago
My understanding is that this is making a trade off of using more space to get shorter access times. Do I have that right?

OT: Tail Slayer. Not Tails Layer. My brain took longer to parse that than I’d have wanted.

addaon•15m ago
This addresses the “short long tail” (known bounded variance due to the multiple physical operations underlying a single logical memory op), but for hard real time applications the “long long tail” of correctable-ECC-error—and-scrub may be the critical case.

Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era

https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing
654•Ryan5453•4h ago•279 comments

System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]

https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/53566bf5440a10affd749724787c8913a2ae0841.pdf
430•be7a•3h ago•293 comments

S3 Files and the changing face of S3

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/04/s3-files-and-the-changing-face-of-s3.html
117•werner•2h ago•32 comments

Lunar Flyby

https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/lunar-flyby/
78•kipi•7h ago•12 comments

GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks

https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.1
353•zixuanlimit•5h ago•105 comments

Bitcoin and Quantum Computing

https://nehanarula.org/2026/04/03/bitcoin-and-quantum-computing.html
42•nehan•1h ago•17 comments

How to get better at guitar

https://www.jakeworth.com/posts/how-to-get-better-at-guitar/
97•jwworth•2d ago•37 comments

Show HN: Gemma 4 Multimodal Fine-Tuner for Apple Silicon

https://github.com/mattmireles/gemma-tuner-multimodal
85•MediaSquirrel•2h ago•7 comments

Cambodia unveils a statue of famous landmine-sniffing rat Magawa

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rx7xzd10xo
218•speckx•4h ago•46 comments

A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-truck-drive-spent-20-years-making-this-astonishing-sc...
195•1659447091•1d ago•31 comments

Move Detroit

https://www.movedetroit.com/program
18•rmason•1h ago•12 comments

Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)

https://sam-burns.com/posts/concrete-laptop-stand/
669•sam-bee•11h ago•207 comments

Rescuing old printers with an in-browser Linux VM bridged to WebUSB over USB/IP

https://printervention.app/details
129•gmac•5h ago•46 comments

Cloudflare targets 2029 for full post-quantum security

https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-quantum-roadmap/
242•ilreb•8h ago•79 comments

A whole boss fight in 256 bytes

https://hellmood.111mb.de//A_whole_boss_fight_in_256_bytes.html
20•HellMood•1d ago•4 comments

Show HN: An interactive map of Tolkien's Middle-earth

https://middle-earth-interactive-map.web.app/
20•frasermarlow•1h ago•1 comments

The Image Boards of Hayao Miyazaki

https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-image-boards-of-hayao-miyazaki
60•vinhnx•1d ago•7 comments

Assessing Claude Mythos Preview's cybersecurity capabilities

https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/
213•sweis•4h ago•28 comments

AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

https://www.danvk.org/2026/03/08/oldnyc-updates.html
100•evakhoury•1d ago•35 comments

Google open-sources experimental agent orchestration testbed Scion

https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/04/google-agent-testbed-scion/
131•timbilt•8h ago•41 comments

Cells for NetBSD: kernel-enforced, jail-like isolation

https://netbsd-cells.petermann-digital.de/
25•akagusu•2h ago•6 comments

A blind man made it possible for others with low vision to build Lego sets

https://apnews.com/article/lego-bricks-for-blind-audio-braille-instructions-5a2a27de4354a0b144317...
29•speckx•7h ago•5 comments

9 Mothers (YC P26) Is Hiring – Lead Robotics and More

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/9-mothers?utm_source=x8pZ4B3P3Q
1•ukd1•8h ago

John Coltrane Illustrates the Mathematics of Jazz

https://www.americanjazzmusicsociety.com/blog/john-coltrane-draws
89•luu•16h ago•7 comments

We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

https://www.juxt.pro/blog/a-bug-on-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/
363•henrygarner•11h ago•179 comments

Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

https://rajnandan.com/posts/taste-in-the-age-of-ai-and-llms/
195•speckx•6h ago•174 comments

Boneyard: Generate pixel-perfect skeleton screens from your real DOM

https://github.com/0xGF/boneyard
22•steveharing1•4d ago•8 comments

Tailslayer: Library for reducing tail latency in RAM reads

https://github.com/LaurieWired/tailslayer
31•hasheddan•3h ago•9 comments

Show HN: Unicode Steganography

https://steganography.patrickvuscan.com
7•PatrickVuscan•9h ago•1 comments

RSoC 2026: A new CPU scheduler for Redox OS

https://www.redox-os.org/news/rsoc-dwrr/
5•akyuu•35m ago•0 comments