Top all-time · #329
Murat Demirbas
Personal blog · muratbuffalo.blogspot.comsystemsprogramming
Murat Demirbas writes Metadata, a personal blog at muratbuffalo.blogspot.com about systems and programming. Since 2010, 156 different Hacker News readers have linked it 620 times, most often “Metadata: Tell me about your thought-process, not just your results”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its distributed systems content: paper summaries on Paxos, chain replication and consistency, plus advice on reading research papers.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- 'sweetest Distributed Systems blogs'; paper summaries 'especially interesting and insightful'; 'you might also like'.
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?
- Metadata: Tell me about your thought-process, not just your results6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2012-01-11
- Foundational Distributed Systems Papers5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-02-28
- Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations and on Avoiding Distributed Consensus5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-03-21
- How I read a research paper (2013)4 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2013-07-26
- Holistic Configuration Management at Facebook4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-02-08
- Hybrid Logical Clocks4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-08-02
- Learning a technical subject (2021)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-12-18
- Tell me about your thought-process, not just your results3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-01-12
- Azure Cosmos DB3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-08-07
- Learning about distributed systems: where to start? (2020)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-06-11
What Hacker News says?
There are some details available[0], although they are scarce. I procured my Aurora intel from a lengthy phone conversation with an exceptionally knowledgeable (and excessively talkative) AWS engineer – who had worked on Aurora – several years ago. The engineer provided detailed explanations of Aurora’s architecture, do's, and dont's as part of our engagement with AWS. The engineer was very proud of AWS’ accomplishm…
Comment linking /2024/07/understanding-performance-implications.html
on “We were wrong about GPUs”Submitted I have seen things as a story · 577 points
HN discussionThanks for the correction, it is Aurora, indeed, although it can be found under the «RDS» console in AWS. Aurora is actually not a database but is a scalable storage layer that operates over the network and is decoupled from the query engine (compute). The architecture has been used to implement vastly different query engines on top of it (PgSQL, MySQL, DocumentDB – a MongoDB alternative, and Neptune – a property gr…
Comment linking /2024/07/understanding-performance-implications.html
on “We were wrong about GPUs”Submitted Learning Machine Learning: A beginner's journey as a story · 414 points
HN discussionAnna is a KV store, for those out of loop: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2022/04/anna-key-value-sto...
Comment linking /2022/04/anna-key-value-store-for-any-scale.html
on “Dragonflydb – A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached”Submitted Facebook's software architecture as a story · 295 points
HN discussionhttp://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com I write about distributed algorithms (Paxos, ABD, chain replication), cloud computing systems (recent papers in systems conferences), distributed databases (consistency guarantees), and blockchains (mostly from distributed consensus perspective). I also write about academic life, research advice, book reviews, and miscellaneous stuff.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted Foundational Distributed Systems Papers as a story · 253 points
HN discussioni think it's largely culture. academics are "graded" based on how many papers they publish. depending on your geography, quality matters too. but in most cases they aren't measured by how much non-peer reviewed publications they have. there is also a technical barrier that works both ways. most don't have the capability to have a regularly updated website with content that otherwise would have been put in the file d…
Comment linking /
on “New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others”Submitted A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting as a story · 237 points
HN discussionGood advice. Here is my advice for reading research papers. http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read-research...
Comment linking /2013/07/how-i-read-research-paper.html
on “How to Read Mathematics”Submitted Paper review: IPFS – Content addressed, versioned, P2P file system as a story · 227 points
HN discussionOne of the sweetest Distributed Systems blogs I have ever read: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com And yes, also my favorite 101 explainer blog: https://arjunsreedharan.org
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?”Submitted The need for tooling and the need for mastering your tools as a story · 222 points
HN discussionSee also: "Strict-serializability, but at what cost, for what purpose?" https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2022/08/strict-serializabi... .
Comment linking /2022/08/strict-serializability-but-at-what-cost.html
on “How Figma's databases team lived to tell the scale”Submitted File systems unfit as distributed storage back ends: 10 years of Ceph as a story · 209 points
HN discussionMurat Demirbas has an interesting analysis that Bitcoin can be viewed as a Paxos variant with very, very expensive leader election: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/anatomical-similar...
Comment linking /2018/03/anatomical-similarities-and-differences.html
on “Distributed Systems Reading List”Submitted Learning about distributed systems: where to start? (2020) as a story · 198 points
HN discussionHere is a summary of the main points http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-to-speak-by-pat...
Comment linking /2020/01/how-to-speak-by-patrick-winston.html
on “How to Speak (2018) [video]”Submitted FoundationDB: A distributed unbundled transactional key value store as a story · 197 points
HN discussionI have been trying to see why full p2p decentralization matters, but am unable to find much support for it. [1] https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/change-my-mind-abo... [2] https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/02/blockchains-from-d... The applications of full p2p decentralization are also not clear: [3] https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/blockchain-applica... [4] https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/201…
Comment linking /2018/02/paper-review-ipfs-content-addressed.html
on “Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality”Submitted My Time at MIT as a story · 181 points
HN discussionI had summarized this talk here: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-to-speak-by-pa... And a couple more pearls from Prof. Winston here as well. https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/search?q=winston
Comment linking /search?q=winston
on “Patrick Winston: How to Speak (2018) [video]”Submitted Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft's Cloud-Born Globally Distributed Database as a story · 179 points
HN discussionHere is a summary of IPFS white paper http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/02/paper-review-ipfs-c... The improvements announced are substantial.
Comment linking /2018/02/paper-review-ipfs-content-addressed.html
on “IPFS 0.5”Submitted Paxos derived as a story · 161 points
HN discussion> ...am i correct to assume it's not the same threat model as encrypted/signed backups pushed to some friends lending storage space for you (who could corrupt your backup but can't corrupt your working data)? Threat model? At a large enough scale, even CPUs can be bad actors: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2021/06/silent-data-corrup...
Comment linking /2021/06/silent-data-corruptions-at-scale.html
on “Garage, our self-hosted distributed object storage solution”Submitted Looming Liability Machines (LLMs) as a story · 158 points
HN discussionI really liked his advice on how to pack and present ideas using the Winston Star formulation http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-package-your...
Comment linking /2016/06/how-to-package-your-ideas-using-winston.html
on “Patrick Winston of MIT CSAIL has died”Submitted The safest job from AI may be writing as a story · 153 points
HN discussion
