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The Observation Deck
Personal blog · bcantrill.dtrace.orgprogrammingsystemscareer
The Observation Deck is a personal blog at bcantrill.dtrace.org about programming, systems and career. Since 2023, 43 different Hacker News readers have linked it 74 times, most often “What punch cards teach us about AI risk”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- What punch cards teach us about AI risk6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-11-26
- Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-12-06
- The relative performance of C and Rust (2018)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-02-13
- Blogging Through the Decades4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-11-18
- The revolt of the reader4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-09-05
- /2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-computer-company/4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-10-26
- Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-12-09
- The Peril of Laziness Lost3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-04-12
- Open source confronts its midlife crisis (2018)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-09-06
- /2013/11/30/the-power-of-a-pronoun/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-29
What Hacker News says?
Oh brother, this again. To bystanders wondering what the hell this is about, it's actually about two things, the most recent of which was over a decade ago. The first thing is a regrettable quip of mine on Usenet (RIP) from October 29, 1996 -- just over 29 years ago (!!) as of this writing. As I have made clear several (many?) times over the years, I do very much regret it: I was young and it was stupid.[0] But that…
Comment linking /2013/11/30/the-power-of-a-pronoun/
on “Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout”Submitted Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025) as a story · 729 points
HN discussionI don't disagree that Sun was a company run aground by engineers -- though I certainly like to think of myself as one of the engineers trying to navigate us around the rocky shoals! For whatever it's worth, I broadly stand by my analysis on HN fourteen years ago (!!) of Sun's demise[0] -- which now also stands as clear foreshadowing for Oxide eight years before its founding.[1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?…
Comment linking /2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-computer-company/
on “Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout”Submitted What Sun got wrong as a story · 692 points
HN discussionUsing Rc doesn't sound like an intrusive list to me. Personally I find tons of Rcs to be messy, so I'd agree with you. > what performance cost Rust code pay due to inability represent cyclic structures efficiently? You can still write the code you'd write in C with unsafe. There's no inherent loss left on the table. Furthermore, a lot of C folks reach for intrusive lists because it's easy in C, but that doesn't mean…
Comment linking /2018/09/28/the-relative-performance-of-c-and-rust/
on “Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental”Submitted The revolt of the reader as a story · 612 points
HN discussion(2025) Also in the author's latest post[0], they took this[1] self-reported preference poll seriously, which makes it very hard for me to take their articles seriously. [0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re... [1] https://writethatblog.substack.com/p/dev-reaction-to-ai-blog...
Comment linking /2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-reader/
on “Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)”Submitted Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel as a story · 425 points
HN discussionFor those interested, here's a take from Bryan after that incident https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2013/11/30/the-power-of-a-prono...
Comment linking /2013/11/30/the-power-of-a-pronoun/
on “Using LLMs at Oxide”Submitted The contagion of fear as a story · 273 points
HN discussionInteresting! Amusingly, if I feed that detector this blog post, it identifies it as confidently robot (97 out of 100 test passages). And running through my last five blog entries, they are all over the map, with three deemed at least "likely robot." Looking further back in time (and taking a somewhat random example), a blog entry from 2008, "Concurrency's Shysters"[0], is also deemed as similarly confidently robot (…
Comment linking /2008/11/03/concurrencys-shysters/
on “The revolt of the reader”Submitted RIP Usenix ATC as a story · 195 points
HN discussionI've just discovered Pangram via https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re... and an analysis of the first paragraphs (first 745 words) resulted in `100% of this text is AI`. This being my first use of Pangram, I cannot vouch for it (though Bryan Cantrill seems convinced).
Comment linking /2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-reader/
on “The browser's main thread is expensive”Submitted College baseball, venture capital, and the long maybe as a story · 175 points
HN discussionMPL 2.0 has been the preferred license for CTO Bryan Cantrill and crew for more than a decade: “And because any conversation about open source has to address licensing at some point or another, let’s get that out of the way: we opted for the Mozilla Public License 2.0. While relatively new, there is a lot to like about this license: its file-based copyleft allows it to be proprietary-friendly while also forcing cert…
Comment linking /2014/11/03/smartdatacenter-and-manta-are-now-open-source/
on “Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack”Submitted Blogging Through the Decades as a story · 63 points
HN discussionI want to read it, because it’s interesting. And yet. https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...
Comment linking /2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-reader/
on “Music Theory for Programmers”Submitted Fool's Expertise as a story · 45 points
HN discussionObviously a very reductive question -- even if sharpened slightly to "most influential" book. I will reduce it even further: one of the few books that I have read twice (and the only one that has exerted different, profound influence on me on each read) is Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine." This is a book that every engineer should absolutely read, though not without an uncritical eye for Tom West and Data Gene…
Comment linking /2019/02/10/reflecting-on-the-soul-of-a-new-machine/
on “Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?”Submitted Intellectual Fly Is Open as a story · 16 points
HN discussionFor whatever it's worth, details of my findings are in [0]. [0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2018/09/28/the-relative-perform...
Comment linking /2018/09/28/the-relative-performance-of-c-and-rust/
on “Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% Rust”Submitted What Sun Got Wrong as a story · 9 points
HN discussionYour confusion isn't mine to solve but fortunately more ink has been spilled already, by folks more capable than I, for just that: https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2018/12/14/open-source-confront...
Comment linking /2018/12/14/open-source-confronts-its-midlife-crisis
on “Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, and going gray”Submitted Open source confronts its midlife crisis (2018) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIt's the FYB point[0], apparently. [0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-sof...
Comment linking /2004/08/28/the-economics-of-software/
on “Euro-cloud provider Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform”Submitted Unikernels are unfit for production (2016) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYes, thank you. Long before eBPF existed, we spent a ton of time on the safety of DTrace[0][1] -- there's a bunch of subtlety to it. The proof is in the pudding, however: thanks to our strict adherence to the safety constraint, we have absolute confidence in using DTrace in production. [0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2005/07/19/dtrace-safety/ [1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... , §3.3
Comment linking /2005/07/19/dtrace-safety/
on “How we found and fixed an eBPF Linux kernel vulnerability”Submitted The Peril of Laziness Lost as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Nuance Not any random ensemble of "Valkey contributors" that did async IO but AWS: One of those cloud providers Redis moved away from FOSS for. One year later, Valkey hasn't just survived – it's thriving! The Async I/O Threading model contribution from AWS unlocked 3x+ throughput by fundamentally changing how I/O threads work inside Redis. Bryan Cantrill on this: ... those open source companies that still harbor m…
Comment linking /2018/12/14/open-source-confronts-its-midlife-crisis/
on “Valkey Turns One: Community fork of Redis”Submitted Love Your Customers as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
