Top all-time · #5009
Julian Browne
Personal blog · julianbrowne.com/articleprogrammingsystems
Julian Browne writes :julianbrowne, a personal blog at julianbrowne.com about programming and systems. Since 2009, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Brewer's CAP Theorem”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link his articles on Brewer's CAP theorem to explain the consistency, availability and partition trade-off in distributed systems and databases, including in discussions of NoSQL and Postgres.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Home Page
Most-linked posts?
- Brewer's CAP Theorem12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2009-07-05
What Hacker News says?
"Performance & scalability mean shyte if you can't guarantee correctness" - well that depends... I take it you are aware of Brewer's CAP theorem? ( http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap-theor... ) If not, you should be.
Comment linking /article/viewer/brewers-cap-theorem
on “Why Use Postgres”Submitted Brewer's CAP Theorem as a story · 23 points
HN discussionBrewer's CAP Theorem The first link is the paper which constituted the proof of the theorem, the other two provide more context and background. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.20.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap-theor...
Comment linking /article/viewer/brewers-cap-theorem
on “What papers should everyone read? - Theoretical Computer Science”Submitted Gangstas Don't Scale as a story · 11 points
HN discussionVirgin Mobile, apparently. http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/space-based-archi...
Comment linking /article/viewer/space-based-architecture-example
on “Tuple Spaces (or, Good Ideas Don’t Always Win)”Submitted Sex Pistols and Cloud Computing as a story · 7 points
HN discussionEpidemic broadcast that you mention, usually happens when you have a fully connected topology and distribution model works with full replication. But the main advantage with riak_core is that you are able to set the replication factor and quorums, which enables you to setup different distribution models --like sharding or peer-to-peer replication + sharding (common case)-- and balance consistency/availability levels…
Comment linking /article/viewer/brewers-cap-theorem
on “Show HN: Erlbus – scalable pub/sub message bus written in Erlang”Submitted Brewer's CAP Theorem as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYep... I never quite bought the NoSQL hype. The only valid point was to relax some of the guarantees (like consistency) in order to achieve better scalability. In the end once cannot escape the CAP theorem ( http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap-theor... )
Comment linking /article/viewer/brewers-cap-theorem
on “The NoSQL Hype Curve is Bending”Submitted Hammer Time as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWhat web framework are you using? It's possible to model inheritance/abstraction within database design but it's not always optimal. You can 'extend' an existing table by specifying the child identifier as a primary and foreign key referencing the parent table (this is called 1 to 1 mapping). Most of the time when you see 1 to 1 mapping you won't see it, because in relational databases you add those columns to the s…
Comment linking /article/viewer/brewers-cap-theorem
on “Ask HN: please help me understand latest trends in database design ”Submitted Death by Customer as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe paper with the actual proof (making this a theorem and not just a conjecture or vague speculation) is here: http://lpd.epfl.ch/sgilbert/pubs/BrewersConjecture-SigAct.pd... This is surprisingly readable, and the introduction is quite good. In addition, here is a blog post that talks about the terms, their meanings, various implications, and the proof: http://danweinreb.org/blog/what-does-the-proof-of-the-cap-th..…
Comment linking /article/viewer/brewers-cap-theorem
on “A plain english introduction to CAP Theorem”Submitted Brewer's CAP Theorem as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Brewer's CAP Theorem (2009) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Brewer's CAP Theorem as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Attraction of Laws as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
