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MaisonBisson
Personal blog · maisonbisson.comprogrammingsystemswriting
MaisonBisson is a personal blog at maisonbisson.com about programming, systems and writing. Since 2013, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “Object Storage: Prior Art and Literary Review (2018)”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link MaisonBisson posts as reference points on tech and history trivia, such as estimates of S3 scale, the Edison phonograph EULA, and camera focal-plane shutter distortion.
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.
a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about
Most-linked posts?
- Object Storage: Prior Art and Literary Review (2018)2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-02-26
What Hacker News says?
11 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 /post/object-storage-prior-art-and-lit-review/
on “Google Cloud Is Down”Submitted Competing Approaches to Deadlines and Excellence as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Do any cloud providers create backups on top of replication though? Any serious database does offer backups in addition to replication, and that kind of validates OP's point. As for object stores there are a variety of techniques [0]. > But an entire cloud storage for photo and video for millions, we're talking maybe exabytes. The notion of making "separate" backups seems cost-prohibitive. Cold-stores like the one…
Comment linking /post/object-storage-prior-art-and-lit-review/
on “Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them”Submitted Object Storage: Prior Art and Literary Review (2018) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAnyone by chance know how many exabytes s3 is? Did some searches but came up with some guesses like https://maisonbisson.com/post/how-big-is-s3/ but they are dated and still just guesses.
Comment linking /post/how-big-is-s3/
on “AWS switch from gzip to zstd – about 30% reduction in compressed S3 storage”The lines are rapidly blurring, given that you can fit, and power, an ARM core sufficiently powerful to run Linux (actually, you can run Linux on far smaller systems than that) with a WIFI interface and web server and run Perl on it on an SD card form-factor device... 4 years ago [1]. Of course there are plenty of niches where you still need a much lower power device, but a lot of areas where you needed that a few y…
Comment linking /post/17379/transcend-wifi-sd-card-hacking-links/
on “How is Ruby different in Japan?”Good find. I think it's worth comparing with the Edison Phonographic Cylinder EULA: https://maisonbisson.com/post/edison-phonograph-eula/ In spirit, it's similar: "We sold you a thing, but it's not really yours." Eventually, that changed, presumably because people resented not actually owning the things that they reasonably believe they owned. It'll be interesting to see how this evolves. This is clearly different,…
Comment linking /post/edison-phonograph-eula/
on “Zynga shuts down FarmVille after 11 years”You'd love this: https://maisonbisson.com/post/object-storage-prior-art-and-l... Talks about Facebook, Instagram, S3 and other Object Store services and how they deal with storage at scale.
Comment linking /post/object-storage-prior-art-and-lit-review/
on “File systems unfit as distributed storage back ends: 10 years of Ceph”Some more resources re Shuffle Sharing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19291163 Also see, this nice little blog post: https://maisonbisson.com/post/hash-rings-sharding-request-re...
Comment linking /post/hash-rings-sharding-request-replication/
on “On Sharding”> I don't know of a single enterprise customer that doesn't have their data replicated to two datacenters, and then backed up to some other medium (tape or disk-based backup appliance) for anything business critical. You snipped out the part of the quote that answers your question. "Most of our customers, if they have on-premises systems—if they're lucky—can store two objects in the same data center, which gives the…
Comment linking /post/object-storage-prior-art-and-lit-review/
on “Amazon S3’s 15th Birthday: 5,475 Days and 100T Objects”I believe you are seeing focal plane shutter distortion. http://maisonbisson.com/post/10531/focal-plane-shutter-disto...
Comment linking /post/10531/focal-plane-shutter-distortion/
on “Video reveals NYC subway ride 108 years ago from Union Square to Grand Central”The technical side of this project is pretty interesting. There's TOR-style anonymity using Reliable Message Delivery [0] (and to a lesser degree also Secure Message Delivery [1]). The whole routing aspect of this network is quite the fascinating rabbit hole. Sybil attacks are addressed with Node Age [2] rather than proof of work, which should be very energy efficient but is maybe open to bribery or collusion (still…
Comment linking /post/object-storage-prior-art-and-lit-review/
on “Safe Network: Secure P2P app system implemented in Rust”