Top all-time · #730
Nathan Marz
Personal blog · nathanmarz.com/blog · on HN as nathanmarzprogrammingsystems
Nathan Marz writes thoughts from the red planet, a personal blog at nathanmarz.com about programming and systems. Since 2010, 87 different Hacker News readers have linked it 122 times, most often “How to beat the CAP theorem”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 38 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Nathan Marz's blog for his writing on Storm and its history, distributed systems and the CAP theorem, software engineering principles, and the productivity cost of open offices.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Called great and interesting to read; a good job relating a principle to coding; unique insights; perfect description.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 38 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- How to beat the CAP theorem15 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2011-10-13
- Suffering-oriented programming14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2012-02-06
- History of Apache Storm and Lessons Learned6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-10-06
- Specter – Clojure API for immutable programming (2017)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-03-01
- The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies5 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2014-02-24
- Functional-navigational programming in Clojure with Specter4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-09-28
- How becoming a pilot made me a better programmer3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-07-13
- The mathematics behind Hadoop-based systems 3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-03-28
- Mimi Silbert and the Delancey Street Foundation (2010)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-08-07
- /blog/introducing-cascalog-a-clojure-based-query-language-for-hado.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-11-03
What Hacker News says?
Reminds me of Nathan Marz's great piece about lessons learnt from creating, and maintaining Storm as OSS: http://nathanmarz.com/blog/history-of-apache-storm-and-lesso...
Comment linking /blog/history-of-apache-storm-and-lessons-learned.html
on “D'Oh My Zsh – How I unexpectedly built a monster of an open source project”Submitted Suffering-oriented programming as a story · 301 points
HN discussion"Datomic is not an update-in-place system. All data is retained by default." I'm becoming more and more convinced that your canonical data store should be append-only whenever possible (see eg [1][2] for detailed arguments). It's nice to see first class support for this. [1] http://nathanmarz.com/blog/how-to-beat-the-cap-theorem.html [2] http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html EDIT: Just read through the whitepap…
Comment linking /blog/how-to-beat-the-cap-theorem.html
on “Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com”Submitted The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies as a story · 252 points
HN discussion"One technique for making software more robust is to minimize what your software depends on – the less that can go wrong, the less that will go wrong. Minimizing dependencies is more nuanced than just not depending on System X or System Y, but also includes minimizing dependencies on features of systems you are using." From http://nathanmarz.com/blog/principles-of-software-engineerin...
Comment linking /blog/principles-of-software-engineering-part-1.html
on “NIH is cheaper than the wrong dependency”Submitted The time I hacked my high school as a story · 224 points
HN discussion> the reality is that at small startups they simply cannot afford that kind of office space It's funny startups would feel that way yet also believe they must be located in/around San Francisco. If cost was really that big of a concern maybe they should choose to setup shop in a more affordable city (they'd also save money on salaries). But even in San Francisco the additional costs wouldn't be that much. There was…
Comment linking /blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans-in-tech-companies.html
on “Just Wear Headphones”Submitted You should blog even if you have no readers as a story · 207 points
HN discussionNathan Marz (of Apache Storm fame) also wrote about this topic recently: "Now, I don't want to comment on the effectiveness of open floor plans for fields other than my own. But for software development, this is the single best way to sabotage the productivity of your entire engineering team ." http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...
Comment linking /blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans-in-tech-companies.html
on “Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace”Submitted You should blog even if you have no readers as a story · 198 points
HN discussion> I've seen the phrase "all the research" thrown around quite a lot in this thread. Would you mind linking to a few studies you refer to? There's a good New Yorker article[1] from last year that references a number of studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses costs/alternatives. Also, "a study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are…
Comment linking /blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans-in-tech-companies.html
on ““Today we moved into our new Facebook building””Submitted My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator startup as a story · 192 points
HN discussionI really enjoyed reading about Storm too: http://nathanmarz.com/blog/history-of-apache-storm-and-lesso... This kind of "competition" leads to analysis paralysis though. Its much better when there is a single winner...
Comment linking /blog/history-of-apache-storm-and-lessons-learned.html
on “Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza”Submitted How to beat the CAP theorem as a story · 183 points
HN discussionthis reminds me a lot of "How to beat the CAP theorem" http://nathanmarz.com/blog/how-to-beat-the-cap-theorem.html
Comment linking /blog/how-to-beat-the-cap-theorem.html
on “Rich Hickey: Deconstructing the Database”Submitted History of Apache Storm and Lessons Learned as a story · 174 points
HN discussionDISCLAIMER: I'm one of PMC member of Apache Storm. Even though Clojure has been Nathan's first-class language, not everyone in contributors and even committers couldn't become native on Clojure. (Though I guess part of committers could feel Clojure as native.) It might not be a problem when Nathan builds most of things in Storm (I'll link his blog post which describes lesson learned from Storm on his perspective htt…
Comment linking /blog/history-of-apache-storm-and-lessons-learned.html
on “Storm 2.0”Submitted Specter – Clojure API for immutable programming (2017) as a story · 152 points
HN discussionIt is interesting to read the history of Storm from the original author (Nathan Marz) himself: http://nathanmarz.com/blog/history-of-apache-storm-and-lesso... Clojure allowed him to build the initial Storm release by himself in only 5 months. > I made all of Storm's APIs in Java, but implemented Storm in Clojure. By keeping Storm's APIs 100% Java, Storm was ensured to have a very large amount of potential users. By…
Comment linking /blog/history-of-apache-storm-and-lessons-learned.html
on “Storm 2.0”Submitted Clojure's missing piece (2017) as a story · 145 points
HN discussion1. First make it possible 2. Then make it beautiful 3. Then make it fast 4. Rinse and repeat Suffering-oriented programming (2012) — http://nathanmarz.com/blog/suffering-oriented-programming.ht...
Comment linking /blog/suffering-oriented-programming.html
on “First do it, then do it right, then do it better”Submitted How to reject a job candidate without being an asshole as a story · 140 points
HN discussionAuthor here. You may also want to check out a more recent post I wrote about blogging that focuses on those "side benefits": http://nathanmarz.com/blog/break-into-silicon-valley-with-a-...
Comment linking /blog/break-into-silicon-valley-with-a-blog-1.html
on “You should blog even if you have no readers”Submitted Leaving Twitter as a story · 138 points
HN discussionIt's hard to compare Clojure and Scala. Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language with strong OOP support and functional support. It's arguably more verbose than Clojure but looks much more similar to Java. Clojure is a Lisp. Lisp stands aside all other programming languages, first of all, because it supports syntactic abstraction (a.k.a. "code is data"). Hardcode addicts (I'm not one of them) say there are onl…
Comment linking /blog/introducing-cascalog-a-clojure-based-query-language-for-hado.html
on “Introducing Drake, a kind of ‘make for data’”Submitted The limited value of a computer science education as a story · 137 points
HN discussionI would store the reservation date and truck length as separate data objects in the batch layer. You would tie them together with the reservation id. It isn't a big deal to do those joins since the batch system is good at that kind of large-scale computation and you've already accepted high latency in the batch layer. I wrote an article about graph schemas on the batch layer here: http://nathanmarz.com/blog/thrift-g…
Comment linking /blog/thrift-graphs-strong-flexible-schemas-on-hadoop.html
on “How to beat the CAP theorem”Submitted How to get a job at a kick-ass startup (for programmers) as a story · 127 points
HN discussion> Is it a coincidence that companies who pioneered the open office plan are also some of the most successful in the world? Many companies that have been among "the most successful in the world" got there without open offices. Just because a company does something doesn't mean it was a major factor in its success. We have no way of knowing if Google (or whoever) would have been less successful had they not been such…
Comment linking /blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans-in-tech-companies.html
on “Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace”Submitted Clojure or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Parentheses as a story · 121 points
HN discussion
