Top all-time · #2269
James Hamilton
Personal blog · mvdirona.comsystemsdata
James Hamilton writes Dirona Around the World, a personal blog at mvdirona.com about systems and data. Since 2008, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 46 times, most often “Silicon innovation and custom ASICs at Amazon [pdf]”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Adventures on Land and Sea
Most-linked posts?
- Silicon innovation and custom ASICs at Amazon [pdf]3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-11-08
- On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services 3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2008-11-13
- /jrh/work/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-11-22
- /2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-09-16
- /jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-12-05
- On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Resources (2007) [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-03-07
- Guido Van Rossum: 21 Years of Py, From Pet Project to Prog Lang of the Year2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-05-25
- Constraint-Driven Innovation [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-20
What Hacker News says?
"On the Designing and Deploying Internet-scale Services" by James Hamilton: http://www.mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf html version: http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton...
Comment linking /jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf
on “Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)”Submitted Silicon innovation and custom ASICs at Amazon [pdf] as a story · 97 points
HN discussionThe Dashews, a couple who design offshore boats (sail and power), after a few years of experimentation, ended up coming to a similar design for their navigation station their FPB line of powerboats: * https://setsail.com/rethinking_modern_nav-2-2/ May not be able to do this on the deck of a traditional sailboat where things are exposed to the elements, but in an enclosed wheelhouse it adds a lot of flexibility, espe…
Comment linking /2016/09/maretron-n2kview-on-dirona/
on “Dual 75“ 4K TV Floor Computing”Submitted Guido Van Rossum: 21 Years of Py, From Pet Project to Prog Lang of the Year as a story · 96 points
HN discussionAWS' James Hamilton lives pretty much on a boat around the world most of the time [0]. I was at AWS 2008-2014 and had a few chats with him. Super nice, very smart, humble. For a little while he used to be a car mechanic for Italian cars in his younger years. [0]: https://mvdirona.com/
Comment linking /
on “Working Off-Grid Efficiently”Submitted From Mainframe to Smartphone: What an Amazing Trip It's Been [pdf] as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI hope Hamilton's talk from this years AWS reinvent conference will be released as video. His slides are online ( http://mvdirona.com/jrh/work/ ), and many other talks have already been realeased ( https://reinvent.awsevents.com/sessions.html ), but Hamilton's talk seems missing.
Comment linking /jrh/work/
on “A peek at the massive scale of AWS”Submitted On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Resources (2007) [pdf] as a story · 5 points
HN discussionhttp://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf ? This was featured on Adrian Colyer's blog earlier this year ( https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/12/on-designing-and-deployi... )
Comment linking /jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf
on “Ways to do load balancing wrong”Submitted Constraint-Driven Innovation [pdf] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionJames has put out a lot of great material. He's given a talk series and wrote a conference paper called "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services" which is a trove of valuable design insights: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/... (somewhat condensed) Slides from a talk: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_AmazonDev.pdf He writes some of the more practical and useful ad…
Comment linking /jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_AmazonDev.pdf
on “Lessons from 10 Years of Amazon Web Services”Submitted Amazon finished training a 200B parameter LLM and nobody noticed (slide 21) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI am just going to drop a few quick comments. It's 6:39AM in NY, and I just woke up. Maybe not relevant at all, but... I love reading about biography like these. I own a couple books, for example, "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet" did keep me awake for a few days on an early train. This one, absolutely easy to digest, thank you for sharing. 1. So do the four code bases share code they reuse (…
Comment linking /jrh/work/
on “Four DB2 Code Bases?”Submitted Data Center Networks Are In My Way - AWS VP & Engineer [Slides - PDF] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBest hair ever http://mvdirona.com/jrh/work/JamesHamilton.jpg
Comment linking /jrh/work/JamesHamilton.jpg
on “Why Amazon Hired a Car Mechanic to Run Its Cloud Empire”Submitted On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services as a story · 2 points
HN discussionCar Mechanic? He was a Lead Architect for DB2, worked in various Lead/Architect roles on Microsoft SQL Server since SQL server 7.0, etc http://www.mvdirona.com/jrh/Work/default.htm
Comment linking /jrh/Work/default.htm
on “Why Amazon Hired a Car Mechanic to Run Its Cloud Empire”Submitted Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services (2008) [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionEvery cruiser between Ketchikan and Bellingham has a copy of the Hamiltons' book on board: http://www.amazon.com/Waggoner-Cruising-Guides-Secret-Coast/... I didn't know he had a day job. A true renaissance man. Edit: I don't want to geek out too much over his boat, but Nordhavns are awesome. Comfortable, tremendous amounts of internal space, long range, and designed for real cruising. Here's a magazine article on th…
Comment linking /TechnicalArticles/TheHamiltonNordhavn.pdf
on “Why Amazon Hired a Car Mechanic to Run Its Cloud Empire”Submitted Facebook Messages Storage Infrastructure as a story · 1 points
HN discussionnice read. It's also worth mentioning that James Hamilton's personal website [1] has been hosted by Godaddy ever since, including the domain's name servers. [1] http://mvdirona.com
Comment linking /
on “Why Amazon Hired a Car Mechanic to Run Its Cloud Empire”Submitted Amazon Technology Open House as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> A few things around S3 were unique. We launched with a set of ten distributed systems tenets in the press release. The ten tenets were separate from S3, stating that this is how you would want to build distributed systems at scale. We just demonstrated that S3 is a really good example of applying those skills. In my own naive way I believe that AWS, today, probably embodies James Hamilton's vision [0] far more tha…
Comment linking /jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf
on “A Second Conversation with Werner Vogels”James Hamilton, distinguished engineer at AWS, has been living in a boat for several years now, and he's frequently traveling somewhere in the world. [0] He's currently somewhere in Norway. [0]: https://mvdirona.com/
Comment linking /
on “North Pacific Logbook”"Availability Zones (AZs) are within a DC" => not really See this Re:Invent 2014 talk about AWS Innovation At Scale http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamiltonReInvent... => Slide 9: "Each AZ is 1 or more DC, No data center is in two AZs, Some AZs have as many as 6 DCs"
Comment linking /jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamiltonReInvent2014.pdf
on “Immutable Infrastructure: No SSH”AWS was doing 1100 disk in their previous generation storage 42u rack (used 8TB disks for 8.8PB). Source: James Hamiltons talk at reinvent 2016 ( http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/ReInvent2016_James%20... p25)
Comment linking /jrh/talksandpapers/ReInvent2016_James%20Hamilton.pdf
on “Western Digital Announces Ultrastar He12 12 TB and 14 TB HDDs”James Hamilton has blogged on connectivity costs for MV Dirona [1][2][3] on a few occasions, and ISTR his provider KVH is $15000/mo for 150GB allotment at 'Unlimited' speeds (approximately 10Mbps down and 3Mbps up) and $9499/mo for all you can eat at 4Mbps down / 1Mbps up. [1] https://mvdirona.com/2015/08/communications-at-sea/ [2] https://mvdirona.com/2018/04/control-systems-on-dirona/ [3] https://mvdirona.com/2018…
Comment linking /2018/03/kvh-v7-hts-twice-the-speed-more-coverage/
on “Iridium Completes Constellation Replacement”I have helped scale (non web) low latency systems in some pretty stressful situations. In addition to the sage advice about monitoring / metrics, mentoring and not scaling until necessary I think the following are useful: * Design Services not Software. In particular read "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services" ( http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf ) and at least the first chapter of…
Comment linking /jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf
on “Ask HN: How does one gain expertise in scalability?”Recovery-Oriented Computing has hit HN before. Instead of surfing the overview page, check out the toplevel with links to a LOT of fantastic and accessible papers and presentations: http://roc.cs.berkeley.edu/ Then, move on to James Hamilton[1]'s "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services" which is a 10 minute read that's HOWTO on putting Recovery-Oriented Computing into practice: http://static.usenix.org/e…
Comment linking /jrh/work/
on “Recovery-Oriented Computing”Consider using a fleet of front-end machines to accept TCP connections from clients. These machines can parse the HTTP envelope, forward the request to the database server, and generate the HTTP response. There's a lot of useful advice on this topic in "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services" http://www.mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf
Comment linking /jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf
on “Ask HN: How do I handle a million hits a minute?”
