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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,538 posts.

Infrastructure & DevOps
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1233

Public Beta: December 3, 2015

Let’s Encrypt will enter Public Beta on December 3, 2015. Once we’ve entered Public Beta our systems will be open to anyone who would like to request a certificate. There will no longer be a requirement to sign up and wait for an invitation. Our Limited Beta started on September 12, 2015. We’ve issued over 11,000…

1239

Google's Subsea Fiber Optics

Fiber optic networks are a foundation of the modern internet. In fact, subsea cables carry 99% of international network traffic , and yet we are barely aware that they exist. What you might not know is that the first subsea cable was deployed in 1858 for telegraph messages between Europe and North America. A message…

1252

Testing Sync at Dropbox

Executing a full rewrite of the Dropbox sync engine was pretty daunting. (Read more about our goals and how we made the decision in our previous post here .) Doing so meant taking the engine that powers Dropbox on hundreds of millions of user’s machines and swapping it out mid-flight. To pull this off, we knew we…