Top all-time · #1707
Paper Trail
Personal blog · the-paper-trail.orgsystemsscience
Paper Trail is a personal blog at the-paper-trail.org about systems and science. Since 2010, 42 different Hacker News readers have linked it 64 times, most often “A Brief Tour of FLP Impossibility [dist. Systems]”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (22) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its distributed systems theory posts, such as FLP impossibility and Paxos, and for its reading list, which commenters call a useful reference.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Reading list called a great reference and most authoritative list; oldest posts urged as a starting point on consensus.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 22 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Writing about distributed systems, compilers, virtual machines, databases and research papers from SOSP, ATC, NSDI, OSDI, EuroSys and others
Most-linked posts?
- A Brief Tour of FLP Impossibility [dist. Systems]5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-02-10
- Distributed systems theory for the distributed systems engineer (2014)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-10-25
- Distributed systems theory for the distributed systems engineer3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-08-10
- The Elephant was a Trojan Horse: On the Death of Map-Reduce at Google3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-06-26
- Advanced Computer Science Courses2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-06-09
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-01
- Exactly-once or not, atomic broadcast is still impossible in Kafka2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-07-28
- Columnar Storage2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-01-31
- Distributed Systems Theory for the Distributed Systems Engineer2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-06-16
- Paper notes: Masstree – cache craftiness for fast multicore key-value storage2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-09-11
What Hacker News says?
Time to pull up my RSS reader! https://drewdevault.com/ http://jvns.ca/ https://www.benkuhn.net/ https://danluu.com/ https://scattered-thoughts.net/ http://antirez.com/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/ https://neilkakkar.com/ https://zachholman.com/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/ https://endler.dev/ https://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/ https://www.the-paper-trail.org/ https://tonsky.me/ https://dave.cheney.net/ https://b…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Distributed systems theory for the distributed systems engineer as a story · 265 points
HN discussionIt's a huge field, basically distributed computing, burdened here with the glorious purpose of durable data storage. Any introductory text long enough becomes essentially a university-level computer science course. RADOS is the underlying storage protocol used by Ceph ( https://ceph.com/ ). Ceph is a distributed POSIX-compliant (very few exceptions) filesystem project that along the way implemented simpler things su…
Comment linking /page/cap-faq/
on “Garage: Open-Source Distributed Object Storage”Submitted Advanced Computer Science Courses as a story · 256 points
HN discussionAn overview of FLP Impossibility http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/a-brief-tour-of-flp-impossib...
Comment linking /blog/a-brief-tour-of-flp-impossibility/
on “Delivering Billions of Messages Exactly Once”Submitted Distributed systems theory for the distributed systems engineer as a story · 205 points
HN discussionStart with understanding "Consensus problem". Paxos is one of the famous solution. There is blog called "The Paper Trail" which has lots of articles on this topic[1]. You should start with the oldest post IMO (from Three General Proble,, FLP impossibility, 2/3 phase locking, to Paxos). Once you have an idea, you can readup the "Paxos made simple"[2]. In distributed systems, each node needs to agree on facts (which c…
Comment linking /tags/consensus/
on “The Paxos Algorithm, or How to Win a Turing Award”Submitted The Elephant was a Trojan Horse: On the Death of Map-Reduce at Google as a story · 173 points
HN discussionI have many recommendations of different kinds: ## Blogs: - http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/ - https://bartoszsypytkowski.com/ - https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/ - https://www.the-paper-trail.org/ - https://blog.acolyer.org/ - https://pathelland.substack.com/ ## Other web resources - https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/ - set of resources from Amazon about building distributed systems - https://www.yout…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Recommended books and papers on distributed systems?”Submitted Masstree: A cache-friendly mashup of tries and B-trees as a story · 165 points
HN discussionUnfortunately not (my blog is http://the-paper-trail.org but tends to be more theoretical than practical). That would make a good post though!
Comment linking /
on “How to scale a distributed system [pdf]”Submitted Beating hash tables with trees? The ART-ful radix trie as a story · 152 points
HN discussionYou mean in the asynchronous systems model, in the presence of failures, it is impossible to write a reliable failure detector: http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/a-brief-tour-of-flp-impossib... However, you can write a failure detector for a practical system with the help of omega (weakest failure detector): http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~lorenzo/corsi/cs380d/papers/p685-c... In practice, failure detectors mean timeouts. W…
Comment linking /blog/a-brief-tour-of-flp-impossibility/
on “Is Redlock Safe? Reply to Redlock Analysis”Submitted Making algorithms lock-free with Read-Copy Update (RCU) as a story · 121 points
HN discussionYeah, Masstree has settled into the standard set of comparator systems for most research since it was published - and not as a strawman "this system was crap, so let's pretend we've done good work by beating it!" but as a real challenge to do better than. Anna is on my list of systems to include in this review (see https://www.the-paper-trail.org/reading-list/ ). Looking forward to it!
Comment linking /reading-list/
on “Masstree: A cache-friendly mashup of tries and B-trees”Submitted Exactly-once or not, atomic broadcast is still impossible in Kafka as a story · 79 points
HN discussionHere's a recent comparison of Masstree to ART: https://twitter.com/andy_pavlo/status/986647389820747776?s=2... ART looks to be better in most cases. It's on my list of K-V stores to review: https://www.the-paper-trail.org/page/reading-list/
Comment linking /page/reading-list/
on “Masstree: A cache-friendly mashup of tries and B-trees”Submitted On the Death of Map-Reduce at Google as a story · 47 points
HN discussionThe High Scalability blog [0] complements such courses nicely with curated lists of real world distributed systems and practices. I also found this reading list [1] a great reference. [0] http://highscalability.com [1] https://www.the-paper-trail.org/post/2014-08-09-distributed-...
Comment linking /post/2014-08-09-distributed-systems-theory-for-the-distributed-systems-engineer
on “Distributed Systems: A free online class”Submitted Distributed Systems Theory for the Distributed Systems Engineer as a story · 37 points
HN discussionNo, arbitrarily many doesn't automatically mean a huge amount :) This definition covers permanent partitions, but also encompasses temporary partitions which are effectively one dropped message or more. There exist protocols which will be broken by the loss of a single message. Paxos may not be one of them, but there is also a pattern of loss which will break that as well. The theory behind all this really does hold…
Comment linking /blog/?p=49
on “You Can't Sacrifice Partition Tolerance”Submitted Columnar Storage as a story · 36 points
HN discussionThat depends on what level of book, and what you want to learn from it. On "how real distributed systems are built", there isn't a really good book available in my opinion. I liked The Datacenter as a Computer, but it's scope is fairly narrow and is more focused on global infrastructure issues than software design issues. On the math behind distributed systems, Nancy Lynch's book Distributed Algorithms ( http://www.…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Distributed systems for fun and profit”Submitted Beating hash tables with trees? The ART-ful radix trie as a story · 7 points
HN discussionExtremely familiar - see my articles at http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/?p=173 and http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/?p=190 for some tutorials I wrote on the subject. You're correct that failure detection and consensus are very deeply related, in that a strong failure detector is 'sufficient' for consensus. But my point is about client failure detection, not failure detection between servers (which must have some kind…
Comment linking /blog/?p=190
on “Go At Heroku (Doozer)”Submitted Consensus Protocols: Paxos as a story · 7 points
HN discussionOf course, many people don't ever cross the gulf between "i can haz programming" and actual computer science. That doesn't mean they /can't/ self-direct themselves. http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/?page_id=152 (from HN recently) http://overhack.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/self-directed-compu... (my own)
Comment linking /blog/?page_id=152
on “Why Computer Science”Submitted Paper notes: Masstree – cache craftiness for fast multicore key-value storage as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYou might find some of these references useful: Resources for Getting Started with Distributed Systems https://caitiem.com/2017/09/07/getting-started-with-distribu... Distributed systems theory for the distributed systems engineer http://www.the-paper-trail.org/post/2014-08-09-distributed-s... Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit http://book.mixu.net/distsys/ Notes on the Theory of Distributed Systems http://cs-ww…
Comment linking /post/2014-08-09-distributed-systems-theory-for-the-distributed-systems-engineer/
on “Ask HN: What are some good projects/resources to learn distributed systems?”Submitted STM: Not (much more than) a research toy? as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
