Top all-time · #43
Adrian Colyer
Personal blog · blog.acolyer.orgprogrammingdatascience
Adrian Colyer writes the morning paper, a personal blog at blog.acolyer.org about programming, data and science. Since 2014, 607 different Hacker News readers have linked it 1,508 times, most often “The Morning Paper: CS Papers Explained Every Weekday”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Adrian Colyer's The Morning Paper as a summary of computer science and systems papers, and as a reading source for beginners. Posts cover data structures, distributed systems and formal methods.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Commenters call it a favorite and an "awesome resource", say the posts are approachable, and say the author keeps up a remarkable pace.
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.
a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
Most-linked posts?
- The Morning Paper: CS Papers Explained Every Weekday60 people · 61 mentions · first linked 2016-05-09
- /14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2017-03-22
- To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2017-09-19
- What’s wrong with Git? A conceptual design analysis (2016)8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2016-10-24
- Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-03-02
- Extracting PIN by monitoring how phone WiFi signal changes as you type it8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-11-10
- On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-09-05
- Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-09-18
- Analysing the use of outdated libraries on the web7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-03-07
- The morning paper: The Tail at Scale6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-11-04
What Hacker News says?
Hashed time wheels: https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/11/23/hashed-and-hierarchical-... Great for short-lived values in a cache that are frequently accessed. If all of your values always have the same expiration period (i.e. expires at insert time + N period) then it's super efficient. More or less you have an array with a head and tail. Every "tick" (usually each second but you can customize it) you move the read point…
Comment linking /2015/11/23/hashed-and-hierarchical-timing-wheels/
on “Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?”Submitted Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud as a story · 748 points
HN discussionIt must be [CHAMP]( https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/11/27/hamt/#:~:text=CHAMP%20st... .). Acronym for Compressed Hash-Array Mapped Prefix-tree. It is a current state of the art persistent hashtable. I'm surprised that no one mentioned this before, because it is super useful!
Comment linking /2015/11/27/hamt/
on “Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?”Submitted How not to structure database-backed web apps: performance bugs in the wild as a story · 486 points
HN discussionRelated: Hellerstein et. al's paper evaluating the limitations of serverless frameworks for different use cases. ( https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/01/14/serverless-computing-one... ) tl;dr FaaS lifetimes, lack of cache locality, network rates and isolation make serverless platforms great only for embarassingly parallel, short-lived, I/O-bound tasks that don't require high performance and are only occasionally run. Any…
Comment linking /2019/01/14/serverless-computing-one-step-forward-two-steps-back/
on “Serverless: slower and more expensive”Submitted A generalised solution to distributed consensus as a story · 454 points
HN discussion11 9s isn't uncommon. AWS S3 does 11 9s (upto 16 9s with cross region replication?) for data durability, too. AFAIK, AWS published papers about their use of formal methods to ascertain bugs from other parts of the system didn't creep in to affect durability/availability guarantees: https://blog.acolyer.org/2014/11/24/use-of-formal-methods-at... This is a pretty neat and concise read on ObjectStorage in-use at BigTec…
Comment linking /2014/11/24/use-of-formal-methods-at-amazon-web-services/
on “Google Cloud Is Down”Submitted Successful machine learning models: lessons learned at Booking.com as a story · 321 points
HN discussionI'm glad that Google's reasons for their diversity efforts are supported better research than one guy found in his free time. That said, [1] says in its abstract "... the overall difference in outcomes between men and women was small ..." which reminds me of the point about distributions and averages made in the memo. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a long tail of men who fall below the average woman for a var…
Comment linking /2017/08/16/interactions-of-individual-and-pair-programmers-with-an-intelligent-tutoring-system-for-computer-science/
on “Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo”Submitted The paradigms of programming as a story · 319 points
HN discussion15% is from this paper as I recall it: http://ttendency.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/type_study/documents/... https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/09/19/to-type-or-not-to-type-q...
Comment linking /2017/09/19/to-type-or-not-to-type-quantifying-detectable-bugs-in-javascript/
on “Things I Regret About Node.js [video]”Submitted One model to learn them all as a story · 289 points
HN discussion> If 1% of users can't send messages, then that should count as a full-blown outage and should start counting against whatever SLA they advertise. Google published a paper last year describing this approach to measuring uptime: https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/02/26/meaningful-availability/ The idea is to define availability as "the probability that the site 'appeared' to be down for a random user, averaged over a time…
Comment linking /2020/02/26/meaningful-availability/
on “Slack is down”Submitted File systems unfit as distributed storage back ends: lessons from Ceph evolution as a story · 264 points
HN discussionIt's happened quite a few times after that. Consider the merchants who have been known to use fewer than the standard # of confirmations and what it takes to reverse or reuse those charges. For example, here is a blog post on one way to do this: https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/10/01/misbehavior-in-bitcoin-a... . If you want to search you will find that there are scripts to automate this type of action by constructing…
Comment linking /2015/10/01/misbehavior-in-bitcoin-a-study-of-double-spending-and-accountability/
on “Bitcoin Gold Hit by Double Spend Attack, Exchanges Lose Millions”Submitted Millions of Tiny Databases as a story · 263 points
HN discussionMaybe they can use something like this? https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/11/01/optimized-risk-scores/ They optimise a simple set of decision rules which has reasonable accuracy in their application, quite cool really
Comment linking /2019/11/01/optimized-risk-scores/
on “How to recognize AI snake oil [pdf]”Submitted Writing parsers like it is 2017 as a story · 259 points
HN discussionMy favorites: 1. Freecodecamp: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/ 2. Hackernoon: https://hackernoon.com/ 3. The morning paper: https://blog.acolyer.org/ 4. Codinghorror: https://blog.codinghorror.com/ 5. a16z: http://a16z.com/ 6. Ben Thompson : https://stratechery.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are some good technology blogs to follow?”Submitted Let's Encrypt: an automated certificate authority to encrypt the entire web as a story · 256 points
HN discussionThe morning paper (in Computer Science): https://blog.acolyer.org/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are some good technology blogs to follow?”Submitted My VM is lighter and safer than your container as a story · 240 points
HN discussionCover topics around software development, math, programming languages, and academia: http://stuffwithstuff.com/ https://ericlippert.com/ http://thume.ca/archive.html https://medium.com/@mdwdotla https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/posts https://computinged.wordpress.com/ https://blog.acolyer.org/ https://blog.sigplan.org/blog/ https://blog.paranoidcoding.com/ https://blog.regehr.org/ https://eli.thegreenplace.net/ h…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Keeping CALM: when distributed consistency is easy as a story · 218 points
HN discussionThe Morning paper: https://blog.acolyer.org/ Shocked this has not been mentioned yet. It's on hiatus "for now" but I hope this comes back, this was by far my favorite.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Amazon Aurora: Avoiding Distributed Consensus for I/Os, Commits, Membership as a story · 212 points
HN discussionA couple of my favorite blogs - http://antirez.com/ - https://martin.kleppmann.com/archive.html - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing - https://ma.tt/ - https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/ - https://jvns.ca/ - https://www.johndcook.com/blog - http://feross.org/ - https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/ - https://blog.andrewcantino.com/ - https://nickcraver.com/blog/ - https://blog.acolyer.org - https://blog.coding…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Say No to Paxos Overhead: Replacing Consensus with Network Ordering as a story · 199 points
HN discussionHere are a couple: - Papers We Love: https://paperswelove.org/ - The Morning Paper: https://blog.acolyer.org/ [edit: formatting]
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?”Submitted TLA+ model checking made symbolic as a story · 197 points
HN discussion
