Jeff Darcy, a distributed storage engineer who worked on GlusterFS, writes about storage, server architecture, and technology topics.
HN links it for storage and consistency analysis, with commenters citing his critiques of storage designs and his writeup on Rackspace block storage.
Not to beat a dead horse or keep a totally unproductive thread alive longer than it has to be, but, if this is you:
http://pl.atyp.us/
(from your profile) you seem like an interesting person with a lot of experience and perspective to contribute.
So with that said: why not be specific about the selective over-application you're talking about? I couldn't find it in the comment history.
People probably won't agree with you but it would probably be helpful for them to at least know where you're coming from. It has to be better than just resigning yourself to the idea that the moderators are working in bad faith against you.
For my part, if it helps you to know this: I'm one of several people who have been leaning on the mods for literally years to add something about negativity to the guidelines. They pushed back on suggestions for a long time out of many of the exact same concerns people are voicing on this thread. It's not a sudden decision they've made.
I did say that I'd written about it on my site. Here are a couple of links.
http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/?p=2240
http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/?p=2258
Here's one from Randy Bias, which I had also alluded to.
http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/virtual-disks
Now, why don't you take Dennis to task for his lack of supporting information? He provides even less information about methodology, and his results are simply not grounded in reality at all. In my experience, application of a double standard strongly implies preference for outcome. Why don't you actualy state your position, and then back it up to the same degree you demand others do? I know this is Kibitzer News and all, but it would be nice to see something besides sniping from the sidelines for once.
Instead of repeating myself, I'll just cite the blog post I wrote about this, and hope the rest of HN doesn't mind.
http://pl.atyp.us/2013-10-leaning-out.html
Things have changed only a bit since then. A couple of years' worth of still-increasing income have brought me even closer to permanent financial security. I'm still pretty unimpressed by where this industry is headed technically, socially, and financially. I still want to finish one more Big Thing for pay, maybe one more on my own, and then just dabble in whichever smaller projects catch my fancy. I know, based on the responses to that blog post, that I'm far from alone. I suspect that many people reading this will eventually end up in the same place, whether they believe it now or not.
Jeff Darcy tears into this one: http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/?p=2555
"Letting fear of conventional storage drive the creation of 'solutions' that are just as complex without the benefits of being as general, as well tested, or as well documented is a mistake. (Open but undocumented and untested can be worse than closed, BTW, if the cost of reverse-engineering and fixing the implementation is greater than the cost of licensing would have been.) Such attempts generally lose even when considered alone, and even more so when the effects of fragmentation and incompatibility are considered."
For the record, his suggestion to openly commit to not use patents was taken up recently by Twitter and widely applauded, although he copped an amazing amount of flak at the time. I found his blog though, so all is not lost: http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/
In this case, hellbanning just demonstrates that HN is run by a private cabal. Whoever it is can run it in their own way I guess, but without any oversight they're likely to ban people for the wrong reason and with no recourse, and doing so doesn't contribute to things like voting quality.
[Disclaimer: I am a committer on Project Voldemort]
Redis is very cool (I really want to play with it - congrats to VMWare on hiring its author), but it is neither a disk-oriented system [EDIT: fixed per comment, was disk-persistent] nor (most importantly, IMO) a fully distributed system.
See a comment in this blog post for great visual guide to these systems from these two axes (disk-orientation and distribution):
http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/?p=2929