Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 810 posts.
A lot of people are watching the spectacle of Apple vs. the FBI and the Homeland Security Theatre and rubbing their eyes, wondering why Apple (in the person of CEO Tim Cook) is suddenly the knight in shining armour on the side of consumer privacy and civil rights. Apple, after all, is a goliath-sized corporate…
PostgreSQL scalability on multicore and multisocket machines became a subject of optimization long time ago once such machines became widely used. This blog post shows brief history of vertical scalability improvements between versions 8.0 and 8.4. PostgreSQL 9.2 had very noticeable scalability improvement. Thanks to…
Throughout my career as an engineer, I’ve had a hand in numerous product launches that grew to millions of users. User adoption typically happens gradually over several months, with new features and architectural changes scheduled over relatively long periods of time. Never have I taken part in anything close to the…
I’ve been thinking about the lessons distributed systems engineers learn on the job. A great deal of our instruction is through scars made by mistakes made in production traffic. These scars are useful reminders, sure, but it’d be better to have more engineers with the full count of their fingers.
The history of libraries is one of loss. The Library of Alexandria is best known for its disappearance. Libraries like ours are susceptible to different fault lines: Earthquakes, Legal regimes, Institutional failure. So this year, we have set a new goal: to create a copy of Internet Archive’s digital collections in…
A little confession that I have no idea how asyncio works in Python 3.
We launched Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) for AWS in the spring of 2009 (see New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch to see just how far AWS has come since then). Elastic Load Balancing has become a key architectural component for many AWS-powered applications. In…
Update (December 2016): Version 2 of this guide is now available! Announcement post here. Links in this post are updated to send you to the latest and greatest version. Click here to download 8,760 Hours v2 The end of a year […]
Startups can’t do things the same way big companies do. And that’s a good thing; here’s why. Startups and big companies differ in a lot of ways. When it comes to hardware, the gulf between the two is massive. Early-stage startups are painfully under-financed. This lack of capital makes manu
"Python 2.x versus Python 3.x": this is by now an old question. In the eyes of some people Python 2 is here to stay, and in the eyes of oth...
Monolith by Rene Aigner Some patterns are just about the code. If your code looks like this, and you need it to do that, here’s what to do. You’d do well to study such patterns, as they give you a …
This is one of those “N technical things every programmer must read” lists, except that “programmer” is way too broad a term and the styles of writing people find helpful for them are too different for any such list to contain a non-zero number of items (if you want the entire list to be helpful to everyone). So…
Obligatory Disclaimer: Personal or political views presented within this post absolutely do not reflect those of my employer(s), client(s), and/or legal counsel.
In case you missed it, Marius recently wrote a post on the Pyston blog about our baseline JIT tier. Our baseline JIT sits between our interpreter tier and our LLVM JIT tier, providing better speed…
Solving a longstanding mystery, MIT experiments reveal two forms of turbulence interacting. The new finding may explain heat loss in nuclear fusion reactors.
The Rust compiler is written in Rust. This is overall a pretty common practice in compiler development. This usually means that the process of …
So you know the first 6 rules. You’ve maneuvered through the initial offer conversation, you’ve lined up counteroffers from other companies, and now it’s time to move into the actual negotiating. N...
You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical…
