Top all-time · #1644
A. Jesse Jiryu Davis
Personal blog · emptysqua.re/blogprogrammingsystemscareer
A. Jesse Jiryu Davis's personal blog at emptysqua.re covers programming, systems and career. Since 2013, 44 different Hacker News readers have linked it 52 times, most often “API Evolution the Right Way”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link emptysqua.re mainly for posts on distributed consensus (Paxos vs. Raft), MongoDB driver features, a queueing theory book review, and retro gaming and Challenger history.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A. Jesse Jiryu Davis's blog on MongoDB, Zen, and photography.
Most-linked posts?
- API Evolution the Right Way3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-11-13
- Paper Review: Paxos vs. Raft3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-07-16
- LeaseGuard: Raft Leases Done Right3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-12-19
- Choosing the Adventurous Route: The Career Path for Non-Managers3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-03-12
- March to Triumph as a Mentor3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-02-12
- /blog/review-queue-theory-book/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-18
- Why Should Async Get All the Love?: Advanced Control Flow with Threads2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-17
- Who Discovered Why the Challenger Exploded?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-16
- Write An Excellent Programming Blog2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-06-26
What Hacker News says?
Sally Ride had insight into the O-ring failures, and tipped general Donald Kutyna. Kutyna subtly tipped Feynman. Kutyna had invited Feynman over dinner where they talked about Kutyna's car and the O-rings inside of them.. So the story goes. https://emptysqua.re/blog/who-broke-the-challenger-investiga... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19032574
Comment linking /blog/who-broke-the-challenger-investigation/
on “Remembering Allan McDonald, who refused to approve the Challenger launch”Submitted New MongoDB feature for efficiently paging geo queries as a story · 9 points
HN discussionAh yes, "blissful" Zen. That's the best kind! --- It reminds me of Yunmen, a monk who lived in China. He was born around 860 A.D. and he lived ninety years. His enlightenment story is a classic: One day, Yunmen went to visit Mujo. When Mujo heard Yunmen coming, he closed the door to his room. Yunmen knocked on the door. Mujo said, “Who is it?” Yunmen said, “It’s me.” Mujo said, “What do you want?” Yunmen said, “I’m…
Comment linking /blog/the-day-yunmen-broke-his-foot/
on “The blissful Zen of a good side project”Submitted Current and Future Tools for Interactive TLA+ as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> Can you provide any reference to support this claim as far as actually good implementations go? Ah yes now to the No True Scotsman fallacy. Async only works well when it’s “properly implemented” which is only .NET. Even some .NET folks prefer actors model for concurrent programming: > Orleans is the most underrated technology out there. Not only does it power many Azure products and services, it is also the design…
Comment linking /blog/why-should-async-get-all-the-love/
on “Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing (2023)”Submitted API Evolution the Right Way as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSpent so many hours with the version I had on one of those cheap shareware bundle CDs. I'll never forget the bizarre, cheesy sprites, like the Hawaiian shirt zombies[1], or, really, any of them[2]. Fun game. [1] https://emptysqua.re/blog/moraffs-world/moraff-monsters.png [2] https://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/scale_small/13/134049/1...
Comment linking /blog/moraffs-world/moraff-monsters.png
on “The History of Computer RPGs”Submitted Write An Excellent Programming Blog as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIDE these days are more than that :) https://emptysqua.re/blog/unittests-code-coverage-in-pycharm... http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2012/04/code-coverage-for-jav...
Comment linking /blog/unittests-code-coverage-in-pycharm/
on “Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015”Submitted From Python Programmer to Distributed Systems Researcher in 10 Years Without PhD as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSpeaking of queues, any book on in-depth practical queuing theory? This book is highly recommended by many people, including those on HN: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/PerformanceModeling/book.htm... . However, a reading group by seasoned researchers said the book was not necessarily practical on production systems: https://emptysqua.re/blog/review-queue-theory-book/ .
Comment linking /blog/review-queue-theory-book/
on “Queues don't fix overload (2014)”Submitted Are We Serious About Using TLA+ for Statistical Properties? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI gave the presentation in the linked article, here's a written version of the presentation: https://emptysqua.re/blog/paxos-vs-raft/ I hope that the "Paxos vs Raft" debate can die down, now that engineers are learning TLA+ and distributed systems more thoroughly. These days we can design new protocols and prove their correctness, instead of always relying on academics. For example, at MongoDB we considered adopting…
Comment linking /blog/paxos-vs-raft/
on “Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?”Submitted Multi-Paxos in Python, Tested with Jepsen as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRaft is more or less a Paxos variant with good marketing. Sure, the proof for vanilla Paxos won't directly apply, but it's not inaccurate to say that it derives heavily from Paxos, which is all the quote above was saying. See https://emptysqua.re/blog/paxos-vs-raft/ .
Comment linking /blog/paxos-vs-raft/
on “Paxos automatically determined safe and secure”Submitted API Evolution the Right Way as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDefinitely valuable, as an aside, changefeeds are now in mongodb too: https://emptysqua.re/blog/driver-features-for-mongodb-3-6/#c...
Comment linking /blog/driver-features-for-mongodb-3-6/
on “The Future of RethinkDB”Submitted API evolution the right way as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis review is not so nice: https://emptysqua.re/blog/review-queue-theory-book/
Comment linking /blog/review-queue-theory-book/
on “Queues Don't Fix Overload (2014)”Submitted Write an Excellent Programming Blog(2014) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making Getaddrinfo Concurrent in Python on Mac OS and BSD as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Write an Excellent Programming Blog as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Python C Extensions And mod_wsgi as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Review: Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Nezha: Deployable and High-Performance Consensus Using Synchronized Clocks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Should Async Get All the Love?: Advanced Control Flow with Threads as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Paper Review: Paxos vs. Raft as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Write an excellent programming blog (2014) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Grok the GIL: Write Fast and Thread-Safe Python as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Noisiest Block in the Neighborhood: Analyzing NYC Data with Mongolite as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
