Top all-time · #3062
Richard Crowley
Personal blog · rcrowley.orgprogrammingsystems
Richard Crowley's personal blog at rcrowley.org covers programming and systems. Since 2009, 25 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times, most often “Things Unix can do atomically (2010)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Richard Crowley's posts on what UNIX can do atomically, cited for POSIX file operations and locking, and his BashReduce post on Unix map-reduce tooling.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Things Unix can do atomically (2010)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-05-30
- Things Unix can do atomically3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-05-12
- Git Paid, the programmer’s time tracker2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-01-13
- Dependency management for grown ups2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-09-28
What Hacker News says?
> Are we talking about the POSIX interface to files Those give you these atomic ops and optimistic or cooperative locking: https://rcrowley.org/2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomicall... Multi-file transactions can be built by moving whole directories over symlinks to the previous version. The linux-specific RENAME_EXCHANGE flag can simplify this. > or is there a new transactional API CoW filesystems give you snapsh…
Comment linking /2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomically.html
on “SQLite small blob storage: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem”Submitted Things Unix can do atomically (2010) as a story · 207 points
HN discussion1. I don't know if there's a single name for this. I will point out that AWS EBS and Google Persistent Disk as industrial examples of distributed, replicated block devices are also providing durability via replication. They're just providing it at a lower level that ends up sacrificing performance. I'm struggling to come up with a citation but I think it's either Liskov or Lynch that offered a proof to the effect of…
Comment linking /2019/disasterpiece-theater.html
on “PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA”Submitted Things UNIX can do atomically as a story · 148 points
HN discussionThis of course before saying anything about transactional safety of writing directly to the filesystem You do realize that rename(2), open(2) with O_CREAT | O_EXCL, mkdir(2) and still other POSIX filesystem operations are fully atomic, right? http://rcrowley.org/2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomically...
Comment linking /2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomically.html
on “Tell HN: The site was offline. What changed?”Submitted Things Unix can do atomically as a story · 62 points
HN discussionYou remind me of when I started to actually get this stuff and it occurred to me that monads are just metadata+data with some special properties, and I posted about it on reddit and got downvoted to hell and told the many ways how that's wrong. The FP crowd...must be great at parties. I get this frustration. I think a big part of it is difference in definitions. There's the mathematician's monad, which is pure and a…
Comment linking /2011/09/21/monads.html
on “Monads are monoids in the category of endofunctors”Submitted Graceful stopping in Go as a story · 52 points
HN discussion> that offers transactions, or "compare and swap"-type operations? "Things UNIX can do atomically" https://rcrowley.org/2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomicall...
Comment linking /2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomically.html
on “Spawn your shell like it's the 90s again”Submitted Monads without pretension (2011) as a story · 51 points
HN discussionIf you like the general concept, you should check out BashReduce. As silly as it sounds, it is quite powerful. http://rcrowley.org/2009/06/27/bashreduce.html
Comment linking /2009/06/27/bashreduce.html
on “Manta: Unix Meets Map Reduce”Submitted Things UNIX can do atomically as a story · 36 points
HN discussionI can see the value of RVM for developers, running the same code against various gemsets and versions of Ruby, I used it this way, but not for deployment, why not simply compile everything necessary by hand, install the necessary gems, say ruby 1.9.2 with rails 3.0.3 and some other gems, and them use the result to chroot personalized deploys (or containerize them) instead of installing various versions of ruby with…
Comment linking /articles/dependencies.html
on “Ubuntu, Ruby, RVM, Rails, and You”Submitted Functional programming in C as a story · 23 points
HN discussionYou can read/watch an overview of the previous generation of OpenDNS stats here: http://rcrowley.org/2009/06/23/building-opendns-stats-at-vel...
Comment linking /2009/06/23/building-opendns-stats-at-velocity
on “Redesigning the OpenDNS DNS database for low latency”Submitted Things Unix can do atomically as a story · 16 points
HN discussionFor POSIX, yes. https://rcrowley.org/2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomicall... Windows has a deep well of POSIX in the kernel (plus hard file locks), and it appears to hold there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
Comment linking /2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomically.html
on “Everything you never wanted to know about file locking (2010)”Submitted Dependency management for grown ups as a story · 13 points
HN discussionI think you misunderstood the first half of my comment. Many of those things have an asterisk after “synchronous”, but in their default mode they often are in fact sync. Saying “technically commands are posted and later observed, and that’s how we get security vulns” is an extraordinary claim. The vast, vast majority of program statements do not work thus. Memory operations immediately move instructions through the…
Comment linking /2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomically.html
on “Designing a Passively Safe API”Submitted Monads without pretension as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://rcrowley.org/2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomicall...
Comment linking /2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomically.html
on “Database Fundamentals”Submitted Source and Binary has ceased operations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Things UNIX can do atomically (2010) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Certified as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Git Paid - The Programmers Time Tracker (2011) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Federated Graphite as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Git Paid, the programmer’s time tracker as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted BashReduce as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A blueprint is not a diff but it doesn’t matter as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Developing Operability as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
