Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 269 posts.

Databases & Data
248

Three Types of Data

In my work I’ve developed a mental framework related to data modeling, which has helped greatly both when coming up with a model and when making decisions down the road about how to use that model. Here I will establish three different categories of data in software: Constants, State, and Cached Values. By “data” I…

249

Holes in Bayesian Statistics

Every philosophy has holes, and it is the responsibility of proponents of a philosophy to point out these problems. Here are a few holes in Bayesian data analysis: (1) the usual rules of conditional probability fail in the quantum realm, (2) flat or weak priors lead to terrible inferences about things we care about…

255

Understanding Raft Consensus

Recently I was digging deeper into Raft , an important algorithm in the field of distributed systems. Raft is a consensus algorithm , meaning that it is designed to facilitate a set of computers agreeing on a state of the world (more on exactly how the state of the world is represented later), even when communications…

265

Amazon S3 Update – Strong Read-After-Write Consistency

When we launched S3 back in 2006, I discussed its virtually unlimited capacity (“…easily store any number of blocks…”), the fact that it was designed to provide 99.99% availability, and that it offered durable storage, with data transparently stored in multiple locations. Since that launch, our customers have used S3…