Top all-time · #344
Oren Eini
Personal blog · ayende.comprogrammingdata
Oren Eini writes Ayende @ Rahien, a personal blog at ayende.com about programming and data. Since 2007, 151 different Hacker News readers have linked it 395 times, most often “How to waste CPU and kill your disk by scaling 100M inefficiently”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Oren Eini's long-running blog by the RavenDB creator for database internals, C# performance and code reviews, including a long LMDB code review series and posts on OSS business models.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Called very long and very good, a nice explanation, a really interesting post, and worth reading.
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.
OREN EINI aka Ayende Rahien CEO of RAVENDB LTD, which develops RAVENDB, a NoSQL Open Source Document Database.
Most-linked posts?
- /blog4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-10-17
- How to waste CPU and kill your disk by scaling 100M inefficiently3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-05-31
- Production postmortem: The unavailable Linux server3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-02-22
- A response to “Why you can't be a good .NET developer” (2016)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-06-16
- /blog3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-01-30
- Map / Reduce – A visual explanation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-03-15
- Implementing a File Pager in Zig3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-01-16
- Making Money from Open Source Software: The Problem2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-02-06
- When people leave2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-02-15
- Career planning: What is your path?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-10-22
What Hacker News says?
I'll give a fun example from the past. I used to work at a company that did auto inspections. (e.x. if you turned a lease in, did a trade in on a used car, private party, etc.) Because of that, we had a server that contained 'condition reports', as well as the images that went through those condition reports. Mind you, sometimes condition reports had to be revised . Maybe a photo was bad, maybe the photos were in th…
Comment linking /blog/170978/the-business-process-of-comparing-the-price-of-milk
on “Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers”Submitted Career planning: Where do old devs go to? as a story · 344 points
HN discussion> the reality is that no one -- absolutely no one -- has built a business on AGPL software and it seems vanishingly unlikely that anyone ever will. I strongly disagree with that. Take RavenDB, which is very much comparable to RethinkDB in terms of a business is dual licensed as AGPL and has a commercial license available [1]. This forces any business doing non-OSI approved OSS work to purchase a commercial license.…
Comment linking /blog/4508/comments-on-ravendb-licensing
on “RethinkDB Postmortem”Submitted Modern programming languages require generics as a story · 242 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 /blog
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Looking into Zig as a story · 242 points
HN discussionI think AGPL is a fairly good choice for anything that's potentially used as a hosted service. All the big enterprises I've worked with so far have a policy that forbids AGPL'd software and rather purchase commercial licenses. SMEs & Startups may make different choices but depending on your product they may not represent the relevant majority of the market anyway. Ayende from RavenDB (which is a great no-nonsense do…
Comment linking /blog/posts/series/186113-A/making-money-from-open-source-software
on “Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money”Submitted Re: Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL as a story · 215 points
HN discussionI quite enjoy these: http://ayende.com/blog (.NET centric, writes RavenDB/NHibernate Profiler) http://blog.headius.com/ (JRuby creator)
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted The struggle with Rust as a story · 200 points
HN discussionhttps://ayende.com/blog
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”Submitted Making Money from Open-Source Software as a story · 175 points
HN discussionI'm not familiar with PG but I am planning on using it in my current project, which is why I'm interested in understanding whether these are really DBMS issues. In the .NET world, for all the database adapters I've used (MSSQL, SQLCE, Oracle, MDB), individual statements are implicitly wrapped in transactions when no explicit transaction has been specified - not sessions/connections. I agree the "implicit transaction…
Comment linking /blog/3775/nh-prof-alerts-use-of-implicit-transactions-is-discouraged
on “PostgreSQL Rising”Submitted Looking into Odin and Zig as a story · 173 points
HN discussion> .NET developers love using the standard libs I may not be a typical .Net developer, but my personal feeling is that this is too general and somewhat glib. If you're inexperienced you will (and should!) choose the default option, if there's one available, and the most commonly used option if there isn't a default. So, if you wanted an ORM, then before EF there was NHibernate. But after a while you become able (from…
Comment linking /blog/4139/nhibernate-documentation
on “Thoughts on Rust bloat”Submitted I was wrong, reflecting on the .NET design choices as a story · 165 points
HN discussionThere's a series of blog posts by Oren Eini that shows that C# can be sufficiently fast even when you don't really optimize anything. Beating Redis in every benchmark is a whole another level, of course. https://ayende.com/blog/197412-B/high-performance-net-buildi...
Comment linking /blog/197412-B/high-performance-net-building-a-redis-clone-naively
on “Garnet – A new remote cache-store from Microsoft Research”Submitted Criticizing Hare language approach for generic data structures as a story · 151 points
HN discussionTo give you a glimpse of reality: https://ayende.com/blog/Images/Windows-Live-Writer/Pair-Prog... EDIT: Wow i clicked on #Coding and it is like i taught about it...pure waste of time with Rainbowhairs and talking needle slim guy's with more grease on top than the hole movie 'Grease'
Comment linking /blog/Images/Windows-Live-Writer/Pair-Programming-at-Hibernating-Rhinos_BBD1/IMG_1809.jpg
on “The TikTok War”Submitted Reading the NSA’s codebase: LemonGraph review as a story · 135 points
HN discussionThis is a reply to Sarah Mei's post from Ayende Rahien http://ayende.com/blog/164483/re-why-you-should-never-use-mo...
Comment linking /blog/164483/re-why-you-should-never-use-mongodb
on ““MongoDB is dead. Long live Postgresql””Submitted Inventory management in MongoDB: A design philosophy I find baffling as a story · 127 points
HN discussionEDIT: Paste this hacky snippet into your browser's console to save all of the links into your clipboard: (() => { let result = [...document.querySelectorAll('td a')] .map((link) => link && !link.href.includes('ycombinator') && !link.href.includes('javascript:void') ? link.href : '' ) .filter(Boolean); result = [...new Set(result)]; result.sort(); copy(result.join('\n\n')); })(); Just to help, here's a compiled-list…
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Great Blogs by Programmers”Submitted Building a serverless secured dead drop as a story · 121 points
HN discussionhttp://ayende.com/blog
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Great Blogs by Programmers”Submitted A response to “Why you can't be a good .NET developer” (2016) as a story · 116 points
HN discussionStriked me as odd that this is not mentioned: http://ayende.com/blog one of the strongest developers in the .net world, hands down.
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: What are your favourite developer blogs?”Submitted Timing the time it takes to parse time as a story · 109 points
HN discussion> In .Net obviously LINQ. LINQ is not an ORM. There is LINQ to Objects and LINQ to XML, which query collections and XML documents respectively. The first ORM over Linq from Microsoft was Linq to SQL. This is now deprecated, and the second one is called Entity Framework (EF), which was a more ambitious but slower-moving project. In the latest release, EF 4.1, it's actually quite good. NHibernate is still very popular…
Comment linking /blog/4083/nhibernate-linq-1-0-released
on “ORM is an anti-pattern”Submitted Fast Transaction Log: Windows as a story · 109 points
HN discussion