Top all-time · #2009
Brad Fitzpatrick
Personal blog · brad.livejournal.comprogrammingsystems
Brad Fitzpatrick writes brad's life, a personal blog at brad.livejournal.com about programming and systems. Since 2007, 37 different Hacker News readers have linked it 49 times, most often “diskchecker by Brad Fitzpatrick: does your storage stack lie about fsync()?”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (27) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Brad Fitzpatrick's LiveJournal posts, especially his 2005 post showing that disks and SSDs lie about fsync, which many commenters cite for storage durability. Other posts cover memcached, captchas, OpenID and Android hacks.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter calls his memcached post fascinating and inspiring, as they found many of his tech posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 27 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
bored as hell and i wanna get ill
Most-linked posts?
- diskchecker by Brad Fitzpatrick: does your storage stack lie about fsync()?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2009-10-05
- /2116715.html4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-01-20
- /2331278.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2007-07-20
- Contributing to Open Source projects3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-03-21
- Brad Fitzpatrick talks about rssCloud and PubSubHubbub3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-09-15
- brad's life - A proposal: email to URL mapping2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-02-05
- "I, for one, welcome our new Russian Overlords" -- Brad on the LJ buyout2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2007-12-03
- Android Garage Door Opener2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-10-21
- Contributing to Open Source projects (2010)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-07-05
What Hacker News says?
Brad here. I wrote about this when I first joined Google, having noticed the same prior to joining: https://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html That was my big fear of joining Google, being sucked into the black hole. (Ignore the later part of the post about the App Engine app that I couldn't keep running because App Engine kept breaking me all the time.)
Comment linking /2409049.html
on “An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google”Submitted Contributing to Open Source projects as a story · 84 points
HN discussionThere's plenty of network controlled power outlets. Either enterprise/rackmount PDUs, or consumer wifi outlets, or rig something up with a serial/parallel port and a relay. You'd use an always on test runner computer to control the power state. The computer under test would boot from PXE, on boot read from the drive and determine the last write, send that to the test runner for analysis, then begin the write sequenc…
Comment linking /2116715.html
on “I tested four NVMe SSDs from four vendors – half lose FLUSH’d data on power loss”Submitted Perl on App Engine as a story · 39 points
HN discussionThe case of the disks not honoring fsync is famous. I learned about it from Brad Fitzpatrick, author of LiveJournal (later on the Go team at Google) writing about it in 2005: https://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html
Comment linking /2116715.html
on “How to Corrupt a SQLite Database File”Submitted Brad Fitzpatrick talks about rssCloud and PubSubHubbub as a story · 28 points
HN discussionAs long as your hardware doesn't lie as well?? http://brad.livejournal.com/2094221.html http://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html
Comment linking /2116715.html
on “Unix’s file durability problem”Submitted Perl on Google App Engine as a story · 20 points
HN discussionPossibly related: http://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html >Run it and be amazed how much your disks/raid/OS lie. ("lie" = an fsync doesn't work) >It seems everything from PATA consumer disks to high-end server-class SCSI disks lie like crazy. Yes, that includes SATA there in the middle. I'll discuss fixing your storage components in a second.
Comment linking /2116715.html
on “Linux gets frozen, what do you do?”Submitted Export your Facebook phonebook (legal and working) as a story · 15 points
HN discussionOf course not the hardest. http://brad.livejournal.com/2331278.html
Comment linking /2331278.html
on “Hardest captcha ever?”Submitted Android Garage Door Opener as a story · 11 points
HN discussionNo: http://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html
Comment linking /2116715.html
on “Experiment in booting Linux fast”Submitted Programmable A/V Receiver. Let your neighbors turn down the volume at your party. as a story · 10 points
HN discussionDave also has a proposed notification standard of his own, called RSSCloud: http://rsscloud.org/ There's been some drama between the developers of the two systems in the past: * http://scripting.com/stories/2009/07/22/snappyRetardedAnswer... * http://brad.livejournal.com/2405147.html * https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/23404535816912896 (Drama being nothing new to the RSS world, alas. Sigh)
Comment linking /2405147.html
on “Dave Winer: An open Twitter-like ecosystem”Submitted LiveJournal's Brad Fitzpatrick: Golden Handcuffs Removed at SixApart -- What's Next? as a story · 9 points
HN discussionWow, this jogged a memory from when Brad Fitzpatrick (bradfitz on HN) had to write a utility to ensure the hard drives running LiveJournal didn't lie about successfully completing fsync().[1] IIRC, the behavior caused fairly serious database corruption after a power outage. Went back and found the link. To my surprise, it was 15 years ago. To my greater surprise, the original post, the Slashdot article, and the util…
Comment linking /2116715.html
on “Durability: NVMe Disks”Submitted Android Garage Door Opener, part 2 as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI followed Brad on LJ around this time, a time before I learned to program but was into running Linux/FreeBSD on my desktop and taking multiple unsuccessful stabs at building things. I remember his post about memcached: http://brad.livejournal.com/1893677.html I didn't really know what he was talking about but it was really fascinating and inspiring (as a lot of his tech posts were).
Comment linking /1893677.html
on “Memcached turns 10 years old today”Submitted LiveJournal Founder Brad Fitzpatrick "actually, little-known fact: I don't work on LJ, and haven't in a while" as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIf you look at old LiveJournal the short posting form felt a lot like twitter. Here's what LJ content looked like on the day of that Flickr post: https://brad.livejournal.com/2000/05/31/ (Edit: switched the link to match the flickr post.)
Comment linking /2000/05/31/
on “Twttr sketch (2006)”Submitted diskchecker by Brad Fitzpatrick: does your storage stack lie about fsync()? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html some enterprise SCSI drives too. This was all back in the late 90's/early 2000's, no idea if it still happens with SATA or SAS drives...
Comment linking /2116715.html
on “Western Digital's 16TB and 18TB drives: EAMR HDDs enter the retail channel”Submitted brad's life - A proposal: email to URL mapping as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'd been hearing rumors (possibly spread by the mfgs to scare enterprises away from cheap IDE drives) about it during the late 90's and early 2000's. Then bfitz proved in in 2005, and it turns out SCSI drives sometimes do it too: https://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html
Comment linking /2116715.html
on “Western Digital's 16TB and 18TB drives: EAMR HDDs enter the retail channel”Submitted Realtime LiveJournal/Buzz updates with PubSubHubbub as a story · 2 points
HN discussionConsumer disks and SSDs make this much riskier than you think, even if you have done a 'sync'. This has been happening for 11+ years[1] and is getting worse lately. [1] http://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html
Comment linking /2116715.html
on “Why is there a screen that says “It is now safe to turn off your computer”?”Submitted Not Danga as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSome open source projects have "Easy to Fix" issues to get people on the roll (like Scikit-Learn), but many don't. Some have overview of their source code and their design principles (like Redis) but many don't. Some have good documentation of how to get your patches in main tree but many (especially those not hosted on github) don't have it. Most notably for C/C++ projects, the undocumented dependencies to build th…
Comment linking /2409049.html
on “Self-Taught Software Engineers: Why Open Source Is Important to Us”Submitted Contributing to Open Source projects (2010) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
