Hacker Blogs
Work in progress: 15,409 of 181,233 sites checked so far, more every week · updated 2 Nov 2026Missing a blog? Tell us

Top all-time · #2575

S

Something Similar

Personal blog · somethingsimilar.comprogrammingsystems

Something Similar is a personal blog at somethingsimilar.com about programming and systems. Since 2012, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013)”. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.

Visit the blog
33mentions?
32HN people?
2012–2025first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 6 in 2013

Most-linked posts?

  1. Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013)
    13 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2016-07-23
  2. The Opposite of a Bloom Filter (2012)
    5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-01-25
  3. Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
    4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-01-14
  4. The opposite of a bloom filter
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-03-30
  5. Code to Read When Learning Go
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-12-27

What Hacker News says?

  1. When Jeff Hodges gave a presentation of his "Notes on Distributed Systems for Youngbloods"[1] at Lookout Mobile Security back in like 2014 or 2015, he did this really interesting aside at the end that changed my perception of my job, and it was basically this. You don't get to avoid "politics" in software, because building is collaborative, and all collaboration is political. You'll only hurt yourself by avoiding le…

    Comment linking /2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloods/

    on “Don't avoid workplace politics”
  2. Submitted Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013) as a story · 386 points

    HN discussion
  3. The use case in mainly deduplication of a high volume data stream (though it's got a few other uses). The write volume is fairly stable so it's sized in such away that we'll never emit dupes even when the upstream source crashes and needs to be rebuilt from backups (for this case that means > a billion cache entries). Something like the opposite of a bloom filter ( https://www.somethingsimilar.com/2012/05/21/the-opp…

    Comment linking /2012/05/21/the-opposite-of-a-bloom-filter/

    on “Writing a very fast cache service with millions of entries in Go”
  4. Submitted Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods as a story · 373 points

    HN discussion
  5. > Instead of building storage that can fail between nodes, consider building applications that can survive node loss and are not relying on persisting their state in a black box that is assumed to be 100% available. These assumptions about reliablity of systems and their consistent behavior under network partitions has bitten countless people before and will continue to claim victims unless application paradigms are…

    Comment linking /2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloods/

    on “ZFS High-Availability NAS”
  6. Submitted Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods as a story · 346 points

    HN discussion
  7. Another really good article on distributed systems along the same lines is this one: http://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distribu...

    Comment linking /2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloods/

    on “Distributed systems for fun and profit”
  8. Submitted Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013) as a story · 216 points

    HN discussion
  9. Nice catch. I'm not so sure about: A simple fix will be just crawling the links without the request parameters so that we don’t have to suffer. Many links would fail/have different content if the request parameters were removed from the URL. Perhaps the crawler could use some kind of reverse bloom filter [1] to be more careful/back off if it receives the same content from multiple URLs. However nothing is simple at…

    Comment linking /2012/05/21/the-opposite-of-a-bloom-filter/

    on “A method to use Google for DDoS. Bug or Not? ”
  10. Submitted The Opposite of a Bloom Filter as a story · 101 points

    HN discussion
  11. It's subtly different from a cache. http://www.somethingsimilar.com/2012/05/21/the-opposite-of-a...

    Comment linking /2012/05/21/the-opposite-of-a-bloom-filter/

    on “Show HN: BoomFilters – Probabilistic data structures for processing streams”
  12. Submitted Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013) as a story · 100 points

    HN discussion
  13. Only one person in this comment thread mentioned CAP theorem, which is the (highly informal*) rationale for NoSql's existence and also its deliberate aversion to join dependencies (which more or less violate the core principles of eventual consistency modeled distributed data stores.) Useful links for erudition: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.0309.pdf https://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/ https://…

    Comment linking /2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloods/

    on “Comparison of Joins: MongoDB vs. PostgreSQL”
  14. Submitted How to get people to work on your project (2007) as a story · 91 points

    HN discussion
  15. Guys, this is real. http://www.somethingsimilar.com/2012/05/21/the-opposite-of-a... Yes, it's a hash table without conflict resolution. No, that's not the joke. From the article: The simplest data structure that fits the description of a “opposite of a Bloom filter” is a hash map. With a large corpus like the one we were dealing with, the memory consumed by a hash map is far too large and its growth is bound only by…

    Comment linking /2012/05/21/the-opposite-of-a-bloom-filter/

    on “Opposite of a Bloom Filter”
  16. Submitted The Opposite of a Bloom Filter (2012) as a story · 78 points

    HN discussion
  17. As starter read Mikito Takada (mixu) book "Distributed Systems For Fun and Profit" http://book.mixu.net/distsys/single-page.html Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods ( http://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distribu... ) A Note on Distributed Computing ( http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.41.7... ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_comput... You can read…

    Comment linking /2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloods/

    on “Ask HN: Looking to expand my knowledge of distributed systems”
  18. Submitted The opposite of a bloom filter as a story · 76 points

    HN discussion
  19. Submitted The Opposite of a Bloom Filter as a story · 8 points

    HN discussion
  20. Submitted Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods as a story · 7 points

    HN discussion
  21. Submitted Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013) as a story · 5 points

    HN discussion
  22. Submitted Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods – Something Similar as a story · 4 points

    HN discussion
  23. Submitted Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013) as a story · 4 points

    HN discussion
  24. Submitted Code to Read When Learning Go as a story · 4 points

    HN discussion
  25. Submitted Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013) as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  26. Submitted Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013) as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  27. Submitted Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  28. Submitted Code to Read When Learning Go (2013) as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  29. Submitted Code To Read While Learning Go as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  30. Submitted The Opposite of a Bloom Filter (2012) as a story · 1 points

    HN discussion

Search all of HN for somethingsimilar.com

Linked by the same people?