Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 498 posts.

Systems & Performance
169

MongoDB 3.4.0-rc3

In the past year and a half, MongoDB has put a good deal of work into improved read safety, enabled by the adoption of their new replication protocol and the WiredTiger storage engine. Dirty reads were addressed in 3.2 by introducing a majority read concern , and stale reads were addressed with the introduction of the…

178

50 days of postmarketOS

We are fed up with Android's endless forks! Fifty days ago I have announced postmarketOS, a touch-optimized, pre-configured Alpine Linux , which can be installed on smartphones. It avoids Android's bad habit of forking software for every single device (!) entirely by going the other way around and unifying as much as…

179

At Scale, Rare Events Aren’t Rare

I’m a connoisseur of failure. I love reading about engineering failures of all forms and, unsurprisingly, I’m particularly interested in data center faults. It’s not that I delight in engineering failures. My interest is driven by believing that the more faults we all understand, the more likely we can engineer…