Best of 2012

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2012. 2,098 posts.

Any topic
1154

Why Erlang?

The chance that you are reading this blog post on a device with a multicore cpu is increasing on a daily basis which is why everybody is talking about concurrency now. Concurrency for our web applications and API backends means that we’d like our htop to look like this:

1159

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…