Top all-time · #3380
Terse Systems
Personal blog · tersesystems.comprogrammingsystems
Terse Systems is a personal blog at tersesystems.com about programming and systems. Since 2010, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 40 times, most often “Developing in Production”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-07-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Developing in Production4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-01-27
- Targeted Diagnostic Logging in Production3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-07-23
- Closing the Open Door of Java Object Serialization (2015)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-11-09
- An Easy Way to Secure Java Applications2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-12-23
- JSSE with Object Capabilities2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-22
- Effective Cryptography in the JVM2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-10-05
- Listening to JVM Metrics with JavaSound2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-20
What Hacker News says?
This is neat! I have a tool blacklite[1] that logs to sqlite, so using this I can export those logs automatically to S3 and keep persistent logs even if the instance goes away. I can see this being really useful for k8s and docker containers. [1]: https://tersesystems.com/blog/2020/11/26/queryable-logging-w...
Comment linking /blog/2020/11/26/queryable-logging-with-blacklite/
on “Why I Built Litestream”Submitted Effective Cryptography in the JVM as a story · 71 points
HN discussion> I'm surprised this is up for debate. I looked into logging in protobuf when I was seeing if there was a better binary encoding for ring-buffer logging, along the same lines as nanolog: https://tersesystems.com/blog/2020/11/26/queryable-logging-w... What I found was that it's typically not the binary encoding vs string encoding that makes a difference. The biggest factors are "is there a predefined schema", "is the…
Comment linking /blog/2020/11/26/queryable-logging-with-blacklite/
on “Discussion: structured, leveled logging”Submitted Where Pair Programming Fails for Me as a story · 70 points
HN discussionYou can use an agent to disable the security manager disabling. :-) https://tersesystems.com/2016/01/19/redefining-java-dot-lang...
Comment linking /2016/01/19/redefining-java-dot-lang-dot-system/
on “Scastie: use any Scala compiler and Scala library in the browser”Submitted The Logic of Failure (2011) as a story · 40 points
HN discussionLots of people do exactly this: https://tersesystems.com/blog/2019/10/05/diagnostic-logging-...
Comment linking /blog/2019/10/05/diagnostic-logging-citations-and-sources/
on “Good Logging”Submitted Problems Scala Fixes as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI'd argue that you want to keep that debugging line, but put it inside a guard. Diagnostic logging is used lots in production [1]. [1] https://tersesystems.com/blog/2019/10/05/diagnostic-logging-...
Comment linking /blog/2019/10/05/diagnostic-logging-citations-and-sources/
on “Good Logging”Submitted Fixing the Most Dangerous Code in the World as a story · 7 points
HN discussionYou can also hook up your logging to a feature flag system, so it's only activated for a single user. [1] [1] https://tersesystems.com/blog/2019/07/22/targeted-diagnostic...
Comment linking /blog/2019/07/22/targeted-diagnostic-logging-in-production/
on “Good Logging”Submitted Developing in Production as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> The second problem is to figure out if logging is affecting performance. Spoiler -- it totally can. Kirk Pepperdine talks about logging as a memory allocation bottleneck [1] So I gave my usual logging rant at a workshop that I gave. I was in the Netherlands about a year or so ago. And that night, they went and stripped all the logging out of their transactional monitoring framework that they’re using, which wasn’t…
Comment linking /blog/2020/07/19/listening-to-jvm-metrics-with-javasound/
on “Good Logging”Submitted Effective Cryptography in the JVM as a story · 5 points
HN discussionhttps://tersesystems.com/blog/2019/07/28/triggering-diagnost...
Comment linking /blog/2019/07/28/triggering-diagnostic-logging-on-exception/
on “Good Logging”Submitted Listening to JVM Metrics with JavaSound as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThere's two problems with the lookahead approach: 1) It only applies to the code you write. Libraries can still use insecure object serialization under the hood i.e. you can't apply this to an built in app server running JMX. 2) It doesn't account for pathological objects, i.e. a billion laughs attack: https://gist.github.com/coekie/a27cc406fc9f3dc7a70d More details here: https://tersesystems.com/2015/11/08/closing-…
Comment linking /2015/11/08/closing-the-open-door-of-java-object-serialization/
on “The Java Deserialization Bug”Submitted Developing in Production as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Targeted Diagnostic Logging in Production as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Closing the Open Door of Java Object Serialization (2015) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Right Way to Use Java.security.SecureRandom as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Latency and Throughput with Logback as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Targeted Diagnostic Logging in Production as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Targeted Diagnostic Logging in Production as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fixing the Most Dangerous Code in the World as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Right Way to Use SecureRandom as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Akka Clustering, Step by Step as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Monkeypatching Java Classes as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Disposable Cloud Environments with Vagrant and Tailscale as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ad-hoc structured log analysis with SQLite and DuckDB as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
