Best of 2012

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2012. 3,076 posts.

Any topic
1686

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…

1702

Introduction to monads in JavaScript

I know, I know, the world does not need yet another introduction to monads (or yet another article complaining that world does not need yet another introduction to monads). So you’ll be glad to know this isn’t one of those, in the sense that it’s not new. I thought I’d write it because, first, monads are worth knowing…