Top all-time · #214
Martin Kleppmann
Personal blog · martin.kleppmann.comprogrammingsystemsdata
Martin Kleppmann's personal blog at martin.kleppmann.com covers programming, systems and data. Since 2010, 217 different Hacker News readers have linked it 271 times, most often “Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Martin Kleppmann's posts mainly for double-entry accounting explained as a graph, and also for distributed systems, databases and local-first software.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Called 'excellent', 'one of the best', 'a nice intro' and 'a revelation'; also told readers to read it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)31 people · 37 mentions · first linked 2015-05-28
- Please stop calling databases CP or AP20 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2015-05-11
- How to do distributed locking (2016)19 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2019-05-04
- AI will make formal verification go mainstream16 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2025-12-08
- Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf]9 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2020-12-20
- Accounting for Computer Scientists8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2011-03-07
- Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza (2015)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-01-21
- New courses on distributed systems and elliptic curve cryptography6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-11-18
- Writing a book: is it worth it?6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-09-29
- CRDTs: The Hard Parts [video]5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-07-11
What Hacker News says?
Local-first software is the future: [1]Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud: https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/local-first.pdf
Comment linking /papers/local-first.pdf
on “I'm all-in on server-side SQLite”Submitted AI will make formal verification go mainstream as a story · 824 points
HN discussionCRDTs seem very promising, but we still have a long way to go. The most exciting work in this area is being done by Ink&Switch [0]. They have a number of interesting real-world app prototypes based on CRDTs. - An interesting case where CRDTs failed is Xi-editor, where they tried to use CRDTs as the basis for a plugin system [1,2]. - One of the biggest problems with CRDTs is the overhead needed to keep track of the f…
Comment linking /papers/interleaving-papoc19.pdf
on “CRDTs are the future”Submitted Writing a book: is it worth it? as a story · 642 points
HN discussion> Does this mean that Spanner is a CA system as defined by CAP? The short answer is “no” technically, but “yes” in effect and its users can and do assume CA. It's somewhat ironic that Brewer, the original author of the CAP theorem, is making this sort of marketing-led bending of the CAP theorem terminology. I think what he really should be saying is something in more nuanced language like this: https://martin.kleppm…
Comment linking /2015/05/11/please-stop-calling-databases-cp-or-ap.html
on “Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service”Submitted Accounting for Computer Scientists as a story · 520 points
HN discussionTotally agreed, for the sake of humanity we should strive to make self-hosting as easy and as seamless as possible. But why stop at self-hosting? Beyond self-hosting, it could be extended to local-first paradigm meaning that there's a choice to have a scalable on demand auxiliary cloud based for handling bursty access demands if you need it. In addition, you can have extra backup for the peace of mind. I'm currently…
Comment linking /papers/local-first.pdf
on “Start Self Hosting”Submitted CRDTs: The Hard Parts [video] as a story · 404 points
HN discussionMost of the times Redis's distributed lock works fine, however one should know that its not fail proof and you might run into really weird bugs references: 0 - https://aphyr.com/posts/283-jepsen-redis 1 - https://martin.kleppmann.com/2016/02/08/how-to-do-distribute...
Comment linking /2016/02/08/how-to-do-distributed-locking.html
on “Do you really need Redis? How to get away with just PostgreSQL”Submitted Improving the security of your SSH private key files as a story · 330 points
HN discussionhttps://lukesmith.xyz/ -- very opinionated, but interesting person https://martin.kleppmann.com/archive.html - reading about distributed systems and db are extremely interesting https://danluu.com/ - his metrics articles is how I found him out, but other articles really good too. https://paulefou.com/ -- This is my blog. I write about self-development for software engineers and my experience with different strategie…
Comment linking /archive.html
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted How to do distributed locking as a story · 277 points
HN discussionI love reading about articles on Databases, especially about their internal workings. Some of the blogs I follow: 1. Oren Eini - Creator and CTO of Raven DB - https://ayende.com/blog 2. Tyler Neely - Creator of Sled DB - https://medium.com/@tylerneely 3. Philip O'Toole - Creator of rqlite - https://www.philipotoole.com/ 4. Martin Kleppmann - Author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications - https://martin.kleppmann.…
Comment linking /archive.html
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Making CRDTs Byzantine Fault Tolerant [pdf] as a story · 266 points
HN discussionA couple of my favorite blogs - http://antirez.com/ - https://martin.kleppmann.com/archive.html - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing - https://ma.tt/ - https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/ - https://jvns.ca/ - https://www.johndcook.com/blog - http://feross.org/ - https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/ - https://blog.andrewcantino.com/ - https://nickcraver.com/blog/ - https://blog.acolyer.org - https://blog.coding…
Comment linking /archive.html
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Having a launched product is hard as a story · 248 points
HN discussionHe didn't make me a Lisper (I'm more a Haskell fan these days), but reading Slava's Lisp articles years ago was a significant part of what set me on my current career path. He helped get me into functional programming, which got me a contract job [1], which is how I met one of my current co-founders. [1] http://martin.kleppmann.com/2009/09/18/the-python-paradox-is...
Comment linking /2009/09/18/the-python-paradox-is-now-the-scala-paradox.html
on “RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years”Submitted How to do distributed locking (2016) as a story · 244 points
HN discussion(except for the "reconcile back" to primary) Yes? https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/11/05/database-inside-out-... See also: materialize.com, readyset.io, aws elastic-views (forever in preview).
Comment linking /2015/11/05/database-inside-out-at-oredev.html
on “LiteFS”Submitted Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf] as a story · 216 points
HN discussionThis article [1] "Accounting for Computer Scientists" may help. Visualize money movement between Accounts / Nodes triggered by Transactions / Edges. This model is used to construct a "Fund flow" representation of how money should be moved. One of the essential concepts we use to verify that money is moving through the system is "Clearing", where we add up all of the edges and the balance should equal 0 - that is mon…
Comment linking /2011/03/07/accounting-for-computer-scientists.html
on “Accounting For Developers, Part I”Submitted Please stop calling databases CP or AP as a story · 200 points
HN discussionThere's another very nice description, with useful pictures, by Martin Blais (as part of the documentation of Beancount) at https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... (example picture that I would say is the heart of the idea: https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m... ) Another one, with completely different graphs, is by Martin Kleppman at https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011…
Comment linking /2011/03/07/accounting-for-computer-scientists.html
on “Accounting For Developers, Part I”Submitted Turning the database inside-out (2015) as a story · 192 points
HN discussionThere's a straightforward answer to the "why not" question: because it will result in codebases with the same kind of memory unsafety and vulnerability as existing C code. If an LLM is in fact capable of generating code free of memory safety errors, then it's certainly also capable of writing the Rust types that guarantee this and are checkable. We could go even further and have automated generation of proofs, eithe…
Comment linking /2025/12/08/ai-formal-verification.html
on “If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?”Submitted Using Bloom filters to efficiently synchronise hash graphs as a story · 171 points
HN discussionThere's some really interesting stuff we've been looking into on the Matrix side to solve this - e.g. https://github.com/asonnino/arke aka https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1218 or https://martin.kleppmann.com/2024/07/05/pudding-user-discove... . Meanwhile, Matrix for now does support hashed contact lookup, although few clients implement it given the privacy considerations at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/identity-ser…
Comment linking /2024/07/05/pudding-user-discovery-anonymity-networks.html
on ““Super secure” messaging app leaks everyone's phone number”Submitted Thinking in Events: From Databases to Distributed Collaboration Software [video] as a story · 151 points
HN discussionThe Qualsys analysis states that keys provided by an agent are not disclosed, and that encrypted keys are disclosed in their encrypted form. https://www.qualys.com/2016/01/14/cve-2016-0777-cve-2016-077... Quoting from above: Finally, for these three reasons, passphrase-encrypted SSH keys are leaked in their encrypted form, but an attacker may attempt to crack the passphrase offline. On the other hand, SSH keys that…
Comment linking /2013/05/24/improving-security-of-ssh-private-keys.html
on “OpenSSH: client bug CVE-2016-0777”Submitted Please stop calling databases CP or AP (2015) as a story · 151 points
HN discussion
