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Constant Thinking
Personal blog · constantin.glez.deaicareer
Constant Thinking is a personal blog at constantin.glez.de about ai and career. Since 2011, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this blog's posts on ZFS and storage, such as copy-on-write write behaviour, RAID versus mirroring, deduplication, and a USB-stick ZFS pool. They cite it as a source.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Tech, work, and what comes next. Real understanding for experienced professionals navigating AI-powered change.
What Hacker News says?
ZFS has defragmentation built into the very design of it! It doesn't fragment, it actually turns all random writes into sequential ones, provided there is enough space because ZFS uses copy-on-write atomic writes: http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2010/04/ten-ways-easily-impro... http://everycity.co.uk/alasdair/2010/07/zfs-runs-really-slow... now, for those of us in the Solaris / illumos / SmartOS world, this is well k…
Comment linking /blog/2010/04/ten-ways-easily-improve-oracle-solaris-zfs-filesystem-performance
on “ZFS lands in Debian contrib”Submitted How to save the world with ZFS and 12 USB sticks: 4th anniversary video (2011) as a story · 99 points
HN discussionI agree that mirror is the best (i.e. simple and easy) way to do it, and to avoid raid-greed ( http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2010/01/home-server-raid-gree... ). Mirror (vs Raid-Z) gives us better fault-tolerance and flexibility.
Comment linking /blog/2010/01/home-server-raid-greed-and-why-mirroring-still-best
on “FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System”Submitted Render the Mandelbrot Set in the Joyent Cloud with Node.js as a story · 7 points
HN discussionApplication-level dedup usually works at the file level, while ZFS dedups data blocks (of variable size). The ZFS way of doing it allows saving space on large files that are similar, like VM images. On the other hand it requires storing block hashes in memory. A ZFS dedup table entry is 320 bytes in size [1], so assuming 128 KB blocks that comes to 2.5 GB / TB. Moreover, the tables are kept in the ZFS cache (ARC) an…
Comment linking /blog/2011/07/zfs-dedupe-or-not-dedupe
on “How Mail.Ru Reduced Email Storage From 50 To 32 PB”Submitted Invite your heroes into your AI conversations as a story · 2 points
HN discussionas far as I know zfs[1] and btrfs[2] support dedupe. 1 - https://constantin.glez.de/2010/03/16/opensolaris-zfs-dedupl... 2 - https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Deduplication
Comment linking /2010/03/16/opensolaris-zfs-deduplication-everything-you-need-know/
on “The Slackware Way (2012)”Submitted RAID Greed: Why Mirroring Is Still Best (2010) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhen Sun Microsystems was still existing they made a (quite funny) video putting 12 usb sticks in a ZFS pool with RAID: https://constantin.glez.de/2011/01/24/how-save-world-zfs-and...
Comment linking /2011/01/24/how-save-world-zfs-and-12-usb-sticks-4th-anniversary-video-re-release-edition/
on “Five-Disk Floppy Raid: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage”Submitted Home Server: Raid-Greed and Why Mirroring Is Still Best (2010) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion