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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...
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...
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Visit apenwarr.ca → RSS feedOn Hacker News Dec 2009 – Mar 2026
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2
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...
3
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...
4
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...
5
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...
6
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...
7
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,...
8
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...
9
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...
10
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...
11
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 -- "...
12
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...
13
TCP doesn't suck, and all the proposed bufferbloat fixes are identical
: While I'm suspicious of all JIT-compiled languages, C# has always had a much better IL than java, even since version 1.0, making it easy...
14
IPv4, IPv6, and a sudden change in attitude
A few years ago I wrote [_The World in Which IPv6 was a Good Design_](https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810). I'm still proud of that article, bu...
15
The disappointingly ongoing success of WvDial
In Farmington, CT, in fact, the town my cat was named after. Oh yes. That's how much we love that place. Lukasz, Ashok, and Matt will be...