Top all-time · #3223
Micah Lerner
Personal blog · micahlerner.comsystemsprogramming
Micah Lerner's personal blog at micahlerner.com covers systems and programming. Since 2019, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 262 times, most often “SDN in the Stratosphere: Loon’s Aerospace Mesh Network”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-01-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link these posts as summaries of systems and networking research papers, such as Meta's Defcon, Homa's proposed replacement for TCP, Facebook's TAO data store, and Rudra's Rust bug-finding work.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- SDN in the Stratosphere: Loon’s Aerospace Mesh Network4 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2022-10-09
- Breakfast of Champions: Towards Zero-Copy Serialization with NIC Scatter-Gather4 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2021-07-11
- Metastable Failures in the Wild4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-07-23
- Log-Structured Protocols in Delos, a platform for control plane databases3 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2021-11-26
- Scaling Memcache at Facebook3 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2021-06-06
- Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications3 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2021-06-20
- Meta’s Next-Generation Realtime Monitoring and Analytics Platform3 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2023-03-03
- Elastic Cloud Services: Scaling Snowflake’s Control Plane3 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2023-01-19
- A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google’s Datacenter3 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2022-12-14
- Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-07-25
What Hacker News says?
Just last week, the Meta paper about their Defcon system landed on HN front page. https://www.micahlerner.com/2023/07/23/defcon-preventing-ove...
Comment linking /2023/07/23/defcon-preventing-overload-with-graceful-feature-degradation.html
on “Meta outage”Submitted Monarch: Google’s Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database as a story · 281 points
HN discussion"Specifically, Homa aims to replace TCP, which was designed in the era before modern data center environments existed. Consequently, TCP doesn’t take into account the unique properties of data center networks (like high-speed, high-reliability, and low-latency). Furthermore, the nature of RPC traffic is different - RPC communication in a data center often involve enormous amounts of small messages and communication…
Comment linking /2021/08/15/a-linux-kernel-implementation-of-the-homa-transport-protocol.html
on “We need a replacement for TCP in the datacenter [pdf]”Submitted FoundationDB: A distributed unbundled transactional key value store as a story · 254 points
HN discussionI wrote a summary of one of the approaches for replacing TCP mentioned in the paper (called Homa) here: https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/08/15/a-linux-kernel-implem...
Comment linking /2021/08/15/a-linux-kernel-implementation-of-the-homa-transport-protocol.html
on “We need a replacement for TCP in the datacenter [pdf]”Submitted Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023) as a story · 237 points
HN discussionIf you're interested in Firecracker, I wrote a summary of the original paper here: https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/06/17/firecracker-lightweig...
Comment linking /2021/06/17/firecracker-lightweight-virtualization-for-serverless-applications.html
on “Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda”Submitted Understanding Google’s File System (2020) as a story · 220 points
HN discussionI'm surprised that they published the more recent paper discussed in part 2 [0] since, IIRC, TAO has supported atomic transactions since at least when I was there a few years ago, but better late than never I suppose. I wonder if that means there's still hope that someone at the company will write a blog post about frameworks like: - EntSchema/EntPattern - EntQL - EntAction - PrivacyPolicy - Ent Deletion framework -…
Comment linking /2021/10/23/ramp-tao-layering-atomic-transactions-on-facebooks-online-tao-data-store.html
on “Tao: Facebook’s distributed data store for the social graph”Submitted XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta as a story · 194 points
HN discussionThanks for the feedback! Does this Atom feed work for you? https://www.micahlerner.com/feed.xml
Comment linking /feed.xml
on “Laptop to Lambda: Outsourcing Everyday Jobs to Thousands of Transient Containers”Submitted Tao: Facebook’s distributed data store for the social graph as a story · 170 points
HN discussionThere is a feed. It is title “untitled” though so it may be hard to find in your feed reader after you add it: https://www.micahlerner.com/feed.xml
Comment linking /feed.xml
on “Laptop to Lambda: Outsourcing Everyday Jobs to Thousands of Transient Containers”Submitted Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years as a story · 159 points
HN discussionPaper PDF link: https://www.micahlerner.com/assets/papers/rudra.pdf
Comment linking /assets/papers/rudra.pdf
on “Rudra: Finding Memory Safety Bugs in Rust at the Ecosystem Scale”Submitted Laptop to Lambda: Outsourcing Everyday Jobs to Thousands of Transient Containers as a story · 147 points
HN discussionhttps://www.micahlerner.com I write about new and foundational academic CS research - writing is a way for me to learn and share with others along the way. Some of my most popular writing is: - FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28740497 ) - Monarch: Google’s Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3137…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Understanding Google's File System (2020) as a story · 142 points
HN discussionReally neat paper - I wrote a summary of it here: https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/11/30/faster-and-cheaper-se...
Comment linking /2021/11/30/faster-and-cheaper-serverless-computing-on-harvested-resources.html
on “Faster and Cheaper Serverless Computing on Harvested Resources”Submitted Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications as a story · 134 points
HN discussionIn case someone finds it interesting, kernel bypass also exposes hardware capabilities which can be used for optimization. A recent research attempts at leveraging NICs to accelerate data serialization https://www.sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos... Source: https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/07/07/breakfast-of-champion...
Comment linking /2021/07/07/breakfast-of-champions-towards-zero-copy-serialization-with-nic-scatter-gather.html
on “Kernel Bypass (2015)”Submitted Linux implementation of Homa, a protocol to replace TCP for low-latency RPC as a story · 118 points
HN discussionReally neat paper - a while ago I wrote a summary of the system: https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/06/12/foundationdb-a-distri...
Comment linking /2021/06/12/foundationdb-a-distributed-unbundled-transactional-key-value-store.html
on “FoundationDB: A Distributed Key-Value Store”Submitted Understanding Raft Consensus as a story · 103 points
HN discussionVery nicely presented. The terminology here paints a easy to understand picture. There's an ideal form, & a solidication/realization of that intent. Annealing is a great word for the realization of an intent. Semi sort of related, I notice a little passing similarity in Delos, Facebook's Log-Structured Protocol, comprised of two primary verbs that are sent around: apply, to apply an intent to the underlying platform…
Comment linking /2021/11/23/log-structured-protocols-in-delos.html
on “Prodspec and Annealing: Intent-Based Actuation for Google Production”Submitted Scaling Large Production Clusters at Alibaba with Partitioned Synchronization as a story · 92 points
HN discussionSubmitted Data-Parallel Actors: A Programming Model for Scalable Query Serving Systems as a story · 89 points
HN discussionSubmitted Homa, a transport protocol to replace TCP for low-latency RPC in data centers as a story · 80 points
HN discussionSubmitted Druid: A Real-Time Analytical Data Store as a story · 73 points
HN discussionSubmitted Posh: A Data-Aware Shell as a story · 69 points
HN discussion
