Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 299 posts.

Databases & Data
31

Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1

NATS is a popular streaming system. Producers publish messages to streams , and consumers subscribe to those streams, fetching messages from them. Regular NATS streams are allowed to drop messages. However, NATS has a subsystem called JetStream , which uses the Raft consensus algorithm to replicate data among nodes…

54

Redis is fast – I'll cache in Postgres

There are books & many articles online, like this one arguing for using Postgres for everything. I thought I’d take a look at one use case - using Postgres instead of Redis for caching. I work with APIs quite a bit, so I’d build a super simple HTTP server that responds with data from that cache. I’d start from Redis…

58

Download responsibly

This month we’ve ramped up the infrastructure behind the download server, and downloads should now be available earlier and faster. There’s also a small technical change in that requests for a “…latest” file will now be answered with a HTTP redirect to the specific latest version (see previous blog post).