Skip to content
HomeVideosBooksBlogs
AllTop postsTopics
Podcasts
HistoryListsWatch laterLiked videosFollowing

The videos, books, blogs and podcasts Hacker News keeps recommending, all in one place.

VideosBooksBlogsPodcastsAboutPrivacySettings

Data from Hacker News, HackerTube, HackerBooks, HackerBlogs and Open Library. Credits · Not affiliated with Y Combinator.

HomeVideosBooksBlogsPodcasts
Ctrl K
    J

    Jeff Darcy

    pl.atyp.us · Personal blog · on HN since 2007

    Jeff Darcy, a distributed storage engineer who worked on GlusterFS, writes about storage, server architecture, and technology topics.

    Visit blogHN submissions
    Distributed SystemsSystems & Performance
    What HN says

    HN links it for storage and consistency analysis, with commenters citing his critiques of storage designs and his writeup on Rackspace block storage.

    Stats for nerds
    52HN people shared it
    59linked in comments
    588story points
    Jan 2016last shared
    2009people per year2016

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      It’s Faster Because It’s C
      3 people · 200 points · first shared 2010 · 119 comments on HN
    2. 2
      A Gluster developer's thoughts on Torus
      1 person · 164 points · first shared 2016 · 21 comments on HN
    3. 3
      Availability and partition tolerance explained and diagrammed
      1 person · 40 points · first shared 2010 · 3 comments on HN
    4. 4
      High performance server architecture
      7 people · 24 points · first shared 2007 · 1 comments on HN
    5. 5
      Real Parallel Filesystems
      2 people · 20 points · first shared 2010 · 7 comments on HN
    6. 6
      Thinking at Cloud Scale
      1 person · 15 points · first shared 2010 · Discussion on HN
    7. 7
      Getting Silly About NoSQL
      1 person · 11 points · first shared 2010 · 4 comments on HN
    8. 8
      Fixing Fsync
      3 people · 9 points · first shared 2013 · Discussion on HN
    9. 9
      Distributed File System SBFAQ
      1 person · 9 points · first shared 2015 · Discussion on HN
    10. 10
      A response to NuoDB's "patent"
      1 person · 9 points · first shared 2012 · Discussion on HN

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • tptacekApr 2015

      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.

    • CPlatypusMar 2010

      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.

    • notacowardJan 2016

      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.

    • wmfDec 2009

      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."

    • anthonybApr 2012

      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.

    • strlenJun 2010

      [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

    Related

    Gluster Bloggluster.org27 people

    How far the once-mighty SourceForge has fallen

    Gluster Blog
    Company · last shared 2025
    Emery Bergerpeople.cs.umass.edu/~emery39 people

    How to do research at the MIT AI Lab (1988) [pdf]

    Emery Berger
    Personal · last shared 2025
    Mesosphere Blogmesosphere.com150 people

    Docker vs. Kubernetes vs. Mesos

    Mesosphere Blog
    Company · last shared 2019
    Sun Blogsblogs.sun.com115 people

    128-bit storage: are you high?

    Sun Blogs
    Company · last shared 2014
    Codeship Blogblog.codeship.com138 people

    Crystal: Fast as C, Slick as Ruby

    Codeship Blog
    Company · last shared 2020
    Jeff Geerlingjeffgeerling.com340 people

    Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

    Jeff Geerling
    Personal · last shared 2026
    David Rosenthalblog.dshr.org127 people

    The death of corporate research labs

    David Rosenthal
    Personal · last shared 2026
    Joe Damatotimetobleed.com39 people

    American Express fails miserably at basic security

    Joe Damato
    Personal · last shared 2022