Top all-time · #56
Rachel Kroll
Personal blog · rachelbythebay.com · on HN as rachelbythebaysystemsprogramming
Rachel Kroll's personal blog at rachelbythebay.com covers systems and programming. Since 2011, 495 different Hacker News readers have linked it 1,212 times, most often ““Just remove the duck” (2013)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Rachel Kroll's blog for infrastructure and outage stories, and recommend it as a standing read among tech and solo developer blogs. One commenter finds a reply post's tone defensive.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- One says it is always worth reading; another, an interesting rabbit hole; another, it has many good examples.
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?
- /w/18 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2017-01-30
- “Just remove the duck” (2013)14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2015-03-03
- Optimizing your talking points (2018)11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2018-04-29
- Your nines are not my nines10 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2019-09-04
- /w/9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2012-08-24
- My list of magic numbers (2020)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-11-26
- /8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-06-15
- Whacker News7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-11-04
- Now you can (try to) serve five terabytes, too7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-10-30
- One machine can go pretty far if you build things properly6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-01-28
What Hacker News says?
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/10/26/num/ makes a similar point. I don't remember us saying people only have themselves to blame when that article was posted ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24904204 ). Not sure why we're doing it on this post, which makes a number of completely reasonable and specific suggestions for improvement.
Comment linking /w/2020/10/26/num/
on “We lost 54k GitHub stars”Submitted A terrible schema from a clueless programmer as a story · 842 points
HN discussion> * Depending on the service one customer's experience is not the broad experience. Someone might be having a really bad day but 99.9% of the region is operating successfully, so there is no reason to update the overall status dashboard. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/15/giant/
Comment linking /w/2019/07/15/giant/
on “AWS us-east-1 outage”Submitted fork() can fail as a story · 760 points
HN discussionAfter participating in these comments tonight, I decided to purposely post some of the worst garbage I could find in my home directory. That way, I get to control the fact that yes, I have bad code. They can't act like it's a surprise. http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/01/23/crap/
Comment linking /w/2013/01/23/crap/
on “What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project”Submitted HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know as a story · 730 points
HN discussionThere may well be evil at google, but it's not here. My take on this is that CoreOS and google have different use cases, and the beset solution would have been to fork the project. Since google is big [citation not needed], most development effort would probably end up there, but people who wanted the simple version could stick with it. The difference between a HTTP API and gRPC is one of scale. If the HTTP one is a…
Comment linking /w/2020/03/07/costly/
on “Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad”Submitted Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat as a story · 688 points
HN discussionDamned if you do, damned if you don't in that case. A lot of the 1st generation open source CoCs were not hypotheticals, but "here's things we wish Richard Stallman would stop doing". As head of GNU/FSF, he had tremendous influence in shaping the culture of open source, and one result of that was that it ended up a lot more male-dominated than other areas of "tech": one figure I've seen was around 2% women in presti…
Comment linking /w/2018/10/09/moat/
on “I Violated a Code of Conduct”Submitted I usually run 'w' first when troubleshooting unknown machines as a story · 685 points
HN discussionRelevant: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/gap/ This story is about infra, but it applies just as much for product.
Comment linking /w/2020/05/23/gap/
on “Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down”Submitted “Just remove the duck” (2013) as a story · 682 points
HN discussionRachel said something similar “My own ‘solution’ to it after far too much thrashing was just to say ‘we cannot get all N types of quota in the same place so we are at the mercy of whatever happens to be available, and if that dries up, we stop running’. Granted, this was for some internal stuff that was seven or eight levels removed from anything that anyone on the outside might ever see, but still, it was stupid an…
Comment linking /w/2021/10/30/5tb/
on “Google's infamous internal 2010 “I just want to serve 5TB” video now public”Submitted A change of heart regarding employee metrics as a story · 650 points
HN discussionwhat am I looking at here EDIT: it has been explained to me: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/10/30/5tb/
Comment linking /w/2021/10/30/5tb/
on “Google's infamous internal 2010 “I just want to serve 5TB” video now public”Submitted Look for the duct tape as a story · 616 points
HN discussionBackground: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/10/30/5tb/ This video was hugely influential on changing the way Google does internal tools and operations.
Comment linking /w/2021/10/30/5tb/
on “Google's infamous internal 2010 “I just want to serve 5TB” video now public”Submitted Remote code execution, git, and OS X as a story · 616 points
HN discussionI beg to differ. If you have a metric on "time since last outage", people will be incited to hide problems. There is extensive writing on this subject http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/06/01/count/
Comment linking /w/2021/06/01/count/
on “Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]”Submitted Asking nicely for root command execution and getting it as a story · 589 points
HN discussion> Sure, that timeline looks bad when you leave out the 14 updates between 12:11am PDT and 8:04am PDT. Their 14 updates did not bring my stuff back up. My nines are not their nines. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/15/giant/
Comment linking /w/2019/07/15/giant/
on “Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout”Submitted Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you as a story · 569 points
HN discussionI am so glad someone on HN is here to enforce rigorous standards when it comes to this topic, in particular. Because there have been multiple accounts of bad behavior, both subtle and not-subtle, at tech conferences ( https://shift.newco.co/what-its-like-to-be-a-woman-at-a-tech... , https://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2014/08/do-you-even.html ), but those aren't studies, they're just isolated experiences, so we can igno…
Comment linking /w/2011/12/04/meeting/
on “Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website”Submitted Some items from my “reliability list” as a story · 567 points
HN discussionThis is a response to the Rachel by the bay blog post https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/12/24/wg/ Personally I rarely use a mac, and don't do wg on demand, but one thing that did annoy me was being unable to set dns search domain, which wasn't mentioned in the blog post, but I believe is also caused by OSX deficiencies.
Comment linking /w/2020/12/24/wg/
on “Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app””Submitted Type in the exact number of machines to proceed as a story · 554 points
HN discussion"Your nines are not my nines" [0] [0] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/15/giant/
Comment linking /w/2019/07/15/giant/
on “Cloudflare was down”Submitted How the Valley treats experienced people as a story · 554 points
HN discussionhttps://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/03/bugs/ EDIT Wrong one sorry
Comment linking /w/2013/06/03/bugs/
on “Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel”Submitted ATDT relief as a story · 524 points
HN discussion
