Top all-time · #5378
Royans Tharakan
Personal blog · royans.net/archprogrammingsystems
Royans Tharakan's personal blog at royans.net covers programming and systems. Since 2007, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link Royans Tharakan's posts on large-scale systems: Google's Pregel graph computing, MongoDB at Wordnik, Reddit's scaling mistakes and Hunch's data architecture. They are cited as background references.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
This is a personal blog, been running this for over 20 years and it reflects my personal opinion only. As a disclaimer, I currently work for Google, and my personal opinions may at times have unintentional biases as well. I promise, I’m human.
Most-linked posts?
- /arch/pregel-googles-other-data-processing-infrastructure/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-05-07
What Hacker News says?
Google has published a very short paper about a program, called Pregel, which expresses graph algorithms using message passing between vertices. Apparently its scaling doesn't suck: http://www.royans.net/arch/pregel-googles-other-data-process... They do try to group related vertices as much as possible, but if edges span computers, that's okay too. I assume that it works best when the interconnect between computers…
Comment linking /arch/pregel-googles-other-data-processing-infrastructure/
on “How Hunch Built a Data-Crunching Monster”Submitted Spanner: Google’s next Massive Storage and Computation infrastructure as a story · 49 points
HN discussionhttp://www.royans.net/arch/pregel-googles-other-data-process... http://blog.udanax.org/2009/08/inference-anatomy-of-google-p... http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1073981 also check out PIs publications and his thesis http://research.google.com/pubs/author145.html The lead author will also be giving a presentation on Pregel at SIGMOD 2010: http://www.sigmod2010.org/research_list.shtml
Comment linking /arch/pregel-googles-other-data-processing-infrastructure/
on “Pregel: Large-scale graph computing at Google”Submitted The Reddit problem: Learning from mistakes as a story · 12 points
HN discussionVideo of this talk is available here: http://blip.tv/file/3621377 This article also has some details: http://www.royans.net/arch/mongodb-migration-from-mysql-at-w...
Comment linking /arch/mongodb-migration-from-mysql-at-wordnik/
on “B is for Billion: Wordnik passes 9 billion record mark with MongoDB”Submitted MongoDB: Migration from Mysql at Wordnik as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI think Reddit will be doing something like that. Jereny from Reddit responded to the thread and mentioned they might be moving to cassandra. Its however not a trivial task for a site with that kind of load and data to cutover :) http://www.royans.net/arch/reddit-learning-from-mistakes/com...
Comment linking /arch/reddit-learning-from-mistakes/comment-page-1/
on “The Reddit problem: Learning from mistakes”Submitted You don’t have to be Google to use NoSQL as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pregel: Google’s other data-processing infrastructure as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scalable Web Architectures as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Smarter Honeypots: Using GenAI to Customize as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Velocity 2010 Conference Slides/Videos as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Kafka : A high-throughput distributed messaging system as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Continuous deployments may not be for everyone: Culture as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hive at Facebook as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scaling Early as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scaling Smugmug from startup to profitability as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted How did Google, Youtube, digg, twitter build scalable web sites: List of articles, videos as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
