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100 years of whatever this will be
What if all these weird tech trends actually add up to something? Last time, we explored why various bits of trendy technology are, in my o...
Avery Pennarun
Happy July 4th! For those of us around the world contemplating independence, it's a good day to think about how we came to rely on expensiv...
- Popular posts
- 37
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- #74 personal
Visit apenwarr.ca → RSS feedOn Hacker News Dec 2009 – Mar 2026
Systems & Performance 15Software Engineering 10Career & Management 10Networking & Internet 9Tech Industry & Business 9Tools & Productivity 4
2
The gift of it's your problem now
Recently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hund...
3
The world in which IPv6 was a good design
. It took a look longer to read the book than to play this little web game, but you get pretty much the same thing out of the game, so I hig...
4
What do executives do, anyway?
An executive with 8,000 indirect reports and 2000 hours of work in a year can afford to spend, at most, 15 minutes per year per person in th...
5
The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)
Last November I went to an IETF meeting for the first time. The IETF is an interesting place; it seems to be about 1/3 maintenance grunt wo...
6
Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
We’ve all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members. Or the cost of commun...
7
10 years of whatever this has been
I guess I know something about train wrecks. One night when I was 10 years old, me and my mom were driving home. We came to a train crossin...
8
A profitable, growing, useful, legal, well-loved... failure
. Not the kind of log I meant.
9
Systems design explains the world: volume 1
"Systems design" is a branch of study that tries to find universal architectural patterns that are valid across disciplines. You might thin...
10
Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway
I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that's not what happens. A forme...
11
The Curse of Smart People
A bit over 3 years ago, after working for many years at a series of startups (most of which I co-founded), I disappeared through a Certain V...
12
Git is as revolutionary as Unix pipes (2008)
I am now officially part of the "previous" generation of programmers. I know this because the new generation no longer has "vi vs. emacs" e...
13
Quotes from 1992
I was recently recommended to read the book [Accidental Empires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires) by [Robert X. Cringely](...
14
Absolute Scale Corrupts Absolutely
The Internet has gotten too big. Growing up, I, like many computery people of my generation, was an idealist. I believed that better, faste...
15
I simulated California housing and learned about simulators
Back in the early 2000s, XML was all the rage. An unusual evolution from HTML, which itself was an evolution (devolution?) from SGML, XML w...
16
Tech debt metaphor maximalism
I really like the "tech debt" metaphor. A lot of people don't, but I think that's because they either don't extend the metaphor far enough,...
17
WiFi: “beamforming” only begins to describe it (2014)
[Note to the impatient: to try out my beamforming simulation, which produced the above image, visit my beamlab test page - ideally in a brow...
18
An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage
[Note 2017-12-29: the news.ycombinator.com discussion of this post is unusually useful. You may want to read it first.] [Note 2018-09-01:...
19
Systems design 2: What we hope we know
Someone asked if I could write about the rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) and what I think that means for the future of people, t...
20
Things we finally know about network queues (2017)
How big should your queue be, and what should you do when it fills up? Many times, we implement or even deploy a networking system before w...
21
Avery’s laws of Wi-Fi reliability
Hello everyone! After many years of using a massively hacked-up version of dcoombs's NITLog page generator to host these pages, I've become,...
22
The strange story of etherpad
I don't actually know this story - certainly no more of it than anyone who has read a few web pages. But luckily, I'm pretty good at making...
23
A log/event processing pipeline you can't have (2019)
Let me tell you about the still-not-defunct real-time log processing pipeline we built at my now-defunct last job. It handled logs from a la...
24
A little bump in the wire that makes the Internet faster
My parents live in a rural area, where the usual monopolist Internet service provider provides the usual monopolist Internet service: DSL, r...
25
Wifi: “beamforming” only begins to describe it
[Note to the impatient: to try out my beamforming simulation, which produced the above image, visit my beamlab test page - ideally in a brow...
26
You can't make C++ not ugly, but you can't not try (2010)
...everything that's wrong with C++ comes down to that. Background: I've been programming in C++ since about 1993; that's 17 years now. As...
27
Insufficiently known Posix shell features
It's that time of year again apparently. Rather than fill in the template for you this time, I'll just give you the general outline of what...
28
Git-subtrac: all your Git submodules in one place
Long ago, I wrote git-subtree to work around some of my annoyances with git submodules. I've learned a lot since then, and the development e...
29
Everything you never wanted to know about file locking
1. Nobody really knows how to do it 2. If you think you have a reliable system for doing it, you're probably doing the computer's job -- "...
30
Mtime comparison considered harmful
tl;dr: Rebuilding a target because its mtime is older than the mtimes of its dependencies, like `make` does, is very error prone. redo does...