Top all-time · #48
Kyle Kingsbury
Personal blog · aphyr.com · on HN as aphyrsystemsdatasecurity
Kyle Kingsbury writes Aphyr: Posts, a personal blog at aphyr.com about systems, data and security. Since 2010, 555 different Hacker News readers have linked it 832 times, most often “Typing the technical interview”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kyle Kingsbury's Aphyr blog for its Jepsen distributed-database analyses and its technical-interview series, often to support a point about consistency or to suggest it as reading. Commenters describe the Jepsen work as going into incredible detail and say the older posts relied on m
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Called 'excellent' (interview series), 'the best long form critique' (AI), 'immensely enjoyed' (MongoDB), 'good read'.
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.
Most-linked posts?
- Typing the technical interview51 people · 60 mentions · first linked 2017-04-10
- Hexing the technical interview (2017)43 people · 45 mentions · first linked 2017-04-05
- /tags/jepsen26 people · 33 mentions · first linked 2014-12-18
- Rewriting the Technical Interview (2020)19 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2020-09-15
- Reversing the technical interview (2017)19 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2017-05-21
- Call me maybe: MongoDB (2013)13 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2013-05-19
- Call Me Maybe: MongoDB Stale Reads13 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2015-04-21
- Call Me Maybe: MongoDB (2013)12 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2015-01-10
- /posts/284-jepsen-mongodb12 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2016-07-18
- /posts/282-call-me-maybe-postgres12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2015-04-22
What Hacker News says?
> Do you have something to back that up? This to me reads like you imply that Elasticsearch does not work and scale. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/resiliency/cur... https://aphyr.com/posts/317-call-me-maybe-elasticsearch https://aphyr.com/posts/323-call-me-maybe-elasticsearch-1-5-... The statement was blunt but the reputation is not exactly unearned. These problems become worse proportional to scale.
Comment linking /posts/323-call-me-maybe-elasticsearch-1-5-0
on “Apple open-sources FoundationDB”Submitted Acing the technical interview as a story · 825 points
HN discussionReally sad to hear this. I always had a ton of respect for you guys and your commitment to solid technology. (I mean y'all even passed Aphyr's Jepsen tests out of the gate [1]) You've also always paid a great deal of attention to interface, both in your query language and in administration. One of your engineers even wrote once that maybe you took longer than you should have and over-engineered some things, but now…
Comment linking /posts/329-jepsen-rethinkdb-2-1-5
on “RethinkDB is shutting down”Submitted I Want You to Understand Chicago as a story · 735 points
HN discussionSounds like it hasn't helped with consistency https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads
Comment linking /posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads
on “RethinkDB is shutting down”Submitted Call Me Maybe: MongoDB Stale Reads as a story · 605 points
HN discussionReminds me of https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
Comment linking /posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
on “TypeScript types can run DOOM [video]”Submitted Hexing the technical interview (2017) as a story · 598 points
HN discussionSomehow this reminds me of Aphyr's Technical Interview series[1], and the thought of some assembler dark wizard actually coding this in an interview is highly amusing. [1] https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-intervie...
Comment linking /posts/340-reversing-the-technical-interview
on “55 GiB/s FizzBuzz”Submitted Typing the technical interview as a story · 413 points
HN discussionIt depends how you define "good". I care mostly about my distributed database being correct, living up to its consistency claims, and providing strict serializability. (see also https://aphyr.com/posts/283-jepsen-redis ) I care much less about how easy it is to use or deploy, but "good" is a subjective term, so other people might see things differently.
Comment linking /posts/283-jepsen-redis
on “Is something bugging you?”Submitted When flat rate movers won't answer your calls as a story · 393 points
HN discussionA useful perspective for me has been that C, A, and P are spectra rather than all-or-nothing. A system may bend a bit on availability when some of its replicas are partitioned, because there are fewer servers that can respond at all, smaller aggregate queue depth etc... It has been said that consistency was specified rather poorly in Brewer's original paper, and we've since seen work that dives into the consistency…
Comment linking /posts/313-strong-consistency-models
on “Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service”Submitted Call me maybe: Elasticsearch as a story · 392 points
HN discussionAphyr covers the impossibility of practical CA systems here: https://aphyr.com/posts/325-comments-on-you-do-it-too Sometimes it's helpful to consider a distributed system through the lens of "harvest vs yield" where harvest is the proportion of information in a system reflected by a response, and yield which is the probability of receiving a response at all. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.…
Comment linking /posts/325-comments-on-you-do-it-too
on “Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service”Submitted Call me maybe: Aerospike as a story · 383 points
HN discussionThis answer reminds me of the blog post of the guy asked to implement a linked list iirc during an interview, and he does it all in Haskell's type system. https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview Oh it was N queens, but the line I remembered was "Summon a linked list from the void."
Comment linking /posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
on “I should have loved biology”Submitted Jepsen: RethinkDB 2.1.5 as a story · 379 points
HN discussionetcd didn’t work initially; I wouldn’t call it polished. https://aphyr.com/posts/316-call-me-maybe-etcd-and-consul
Comment linking /posts/316-call-me-maybe-etcd-and-consul
on “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”- tl · 2024-02-04
Submitted How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days as a story · 357 points
HN discussion Funny and illuminating examples of this are the excellent "hexing the technical interview" series (read in any order): https://aphyr.com/tags/interviews
Comment linking /tags/interviews
on “The rise of never-ending job interviews”Submitted Jepsen: VoltDB 6.3 as a story · 301 points
HN discussionSlava (coffeemug) is very brave to introspect publicly and whenever I interacted with him, behaved with greatest integrity and kindness. Unfortunately, his hypothesis here that devtools are a tough market does not ring true. Making a business is always tough, making one that does something new is even tougher. There are many tools and database companies doing extraordinarily well, from Atlassian to Cloudera to Docke…
Comment linking /tags/jepsen
on “RethinkDB Postmortem”Submitted Seconds Since the Epoch as a story · 298 points
HN discussionI was truly hoping that RethinkDB would be the Mongo that Mongo could have been: a NoSQL database, but one with joins; a NoSQL database that is actually CP [0]; a database that comes out of the box with granular real-time updates (so you don't even need to worry at first about the extra moving parts of a Redis server or other queue). For a business starting from scratch with those needs, I'm making do with Mongo, bu…
Comment linking /posts/330-jepsen-rethinkdb-2-2-3-reconfiguration
on “RethinkDB Postmortem”Submitted Call Me Maybe: MariaDB Galera Cluster as a story · 293 points
HN discussionSorry, are there people who do an interview like this and then just treat the result as a boolean pass/fail? I mostly do pair-programming interviews. When I do it async and have them write something, we'll at least discuss the code together. So either way, I'm way less interested in whether they finished than how they did it and how they think about it . And maybe I'm just weird, but I'm not super interested in the…
Comment linking /tags/interviews
on “The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten”Submitted Call me maybe: Elasticsearch 1.5.0 as a story · 276 points
HN discussionThere's also an awesome blog about distributed systems correctness by Kyle Kingsbury at https://aphyr.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are some good technology blogs to follow?”Submitted Hexing the Technical Interview (2017) as a story · 268 points
HN discussion
