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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,981 posts.

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5325

Why Tarsnap won't use DynamoDB

As I've blogged about before, the Tarsnap server code synthesizes a log-structured filesystem on top of Amazon S3 . As a result of this design, for each block of data stored on Tarsnap, the server code needs to keep track of two key-value pairs: First, to map a 64-bit machine number and a 256-bit block ID to a 64-bit…

5328

Startup Fundraising is a Time Sink

"Which one of you is going to be doing the fundraising?" queried a calm and collected Tom Robinson while in a loud venue one Saturday evening at a Startup School after-party. Tom had good reason to be relaxed that evening. His startup, 280 North, had been acquired by Motorola for 20 Million a few mo

5337

Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership

This tension of what customers are asking for vs what customers really need shows up in areas like resilience. Amazon's "Well-Architected Framework" strongly exhorts customers to avoid building production workloads in a single Availability Zone — but Amazon's cross-AZ bandwidth pricing is painful, and Amazon doesn't…