Top all-time · #64
Uber Engineering
Company blog · eng.uber.com · on HN as myhrvoldprogrammingsystems
Uber Engineering is the company blog at eng.uber.com, writing about programming and systems. Since 2015, 525 different Hacker News readers have linked it 837 times, most often “Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Uber Engineering posts for detailed write-ups of their internal systems, such as the MySQL migration, Schemaless, uChat and causal inference work. Many links are given as background for database and chat discussions.
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?
- Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL31 people · 32 mentions · first linked 2016-07-26
- H3: Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index16 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2018-06-28
- Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL (2016)14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2020-04-03
- Rethinking GPS: Engineering Next-Gen Location at Uber13 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2018-04-19
- Fast and Reliable Schema-Agnostic Log Analytics Platform11 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2021-02-19
- Designing Schemaless, Uber Engineering’s Scalable Datastore Using MySQL (2016)11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2016-01-13
- The Road to UChat: Building Uber’s Internal Chat Solution10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2017-07-25
- Genetic algorithms for training deep neural networks (2017)10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2017-12-18
- How We Built Uber’s Highest Query per Second Service Using Go9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2016-02-24
- /9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-01-21
What Hacker News says?
Uber has an interesting approach to solving this issue: https://eng.uber.com/rethinking-gps/
Comment linking /rethinking-gps/
on “GPS”Submitted Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL as a story · 731 points
HN discussionThe original Uber blog post that led to the discussion - https://eng.uber.com/mysql-migration/
Comment linking /mysql-migration/
on “Why we lost Uber as a user”Submitted The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation as a story · 386 points
HN discussionThis only talks about a particular write amplification issue. A far better message IMO is just a few clicks upthread: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/579795DF.10502%40comma... Provides a link to the rationale post from uber ( https://eng.uber.com/mysql-migration/ ), and a tl;dr of it. Prior discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12166585
Comment linking /mysql-migration/
on “Why we lost Uber as a user”Submitted AresDB: Uber’s GPU-Powered Open-Source, Real-Time Analytics Engine as a story · 375 points
HN discussionOne of my last teams used gods from Greek mythology (e.g. Apollo [1], Ares [2]), and another nearby team used Pokemon names. Lots of folks started using similar naming conventions and eventually a clear naming manifesto was sent to all engineers to discourage this practice for new services. It's much easier to discuss and reason about complex systems when the names are self-explanatory, especially when you get to 10…
Comment linking /aresdb/
on “We at $Famous_company switched to $Hyped_technology”Submitted Employing QUIC Protocol to Optimize Uber’s App Performance as a story · 363 points
HN discussionTecton | UI, Data-Viz, Backend, Data Infra | San Francisco & New York City | Onsite At Tecton, we are building a new kind of AI infrastructure that is transforming the way companies solve real-world problems with machine learning at scale. Our founding team created Uber's Michelangelo ML Platform ( https://eng.uber.com/michelangelo/ ), which has become the blueprint for modern ML platforms in large organizations. We…
Comment linking /michelangelo/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring right now?”Submitted Data Race Patterns in Go as a story · 307 points
HN discussionUber actually has some of the best technical writing in [datasci/causal inference]( https://eng.uber.com/causal-inference-at-uber/ ).
Comment linking /causal-inference-at-uber/
on “Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices”Submitted Keeping master green at scale as a story · 301 points
HN discussionSort of random/oddly specific usecase, but this article helped me understand a bit more of what happens under the hood with both PostgeSQL and MySQL: https://eng.uber.com/mysql-migration/ It is a fairly easy read, even for someone (like myself) who has very little knowledge of what's actually going on under the hood of most DBs.
Comment linking /mysql-migration/
on “PostgreSQL 10 Released”Submitted Michelangelo: Uber’s Machine Learning Platform as a story · 268 points
HN discussionWorth noting that mattermost has made pretty significant improvements around this in the past several months, now that there's a large customer: https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ web/apps have been pretty much completely rewritten too. it's noticeably better, if you haven't used it for a while.
Comment linking /uchat/
on “Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian”Submitted Base Web, Uber’s New Design System for Building Websites in React as a story · 266 points
HN discussionFor those that don't know what this comment is about: https://eng.uber.com/multitenancy-microservice-architecture/
Comment linking /multitenancy-microservice-architecture/
on “Slack is down”Submitted H3: Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index (2018) as a story · 262 points
HN discussionUber have talked about their internal chat app, uChat. When OP says they built their own internal chat app, that's not entirely accurate - uChat is built upon Mattermost. https://eng.uber.com/uchat/
Comment linking /uchat/
on “Uber lays off 435 people”Submitted Queryparser, an Open Source Tool for Parsing and Analyzing SQL as a story · 259 points
HN discussionThis is exactly what they did https://eng.uber.com/uchat/
Comment linking /uchat/
on “Uber lays off 435 people”Submitted How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size as a story · 257 points
HN discussionWhile you're not wrong about most of this. uChat is actually built by a pretty large team https://eng.uber.com/uchat/
Comment linking /uchat/
on “Uber lays off 435 people”Submitted Pprof++: A Go Profiler with Hardware Performance Monitoring as a story · 240 points
HN discussionuChat is actually built on top of Mattermost. https://eng.uber.com/uchat/
Comment linking /uchat/
on “Uber lays off 435 people”Submitted Uber’s Big Data Platform: 100+ Petabytes with Minute Latency as a story · 211 points
HN discussion> Half the "namespace" of nearly every coordinate system is biased toward the poles. The distance between 89° N, 10°W, and 89°N, 10°E is 38km, but at 1°N, it's 2226km. My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes. The "S2" geometry system ( http://s2geometry.io/ ) is what Google Maps and many other l…
Comment linking /h3/
on “Why Bother with What Three Words?”Submitted Optimizing M3: Halving Our Metrics Ingestion Latency by Forking the Go Compiler as a story · 206 points
HN discussionThere's plenty of companies that wasted a ton of resources trying to roll their own version of things that should be services. Remember when Uber built their own chat solution? [0] > With operations in over 620 cities, it was paramount for us to identify a chat solution that would enable Uber employees to reliably communicate on desktop and mobile regardless of where they were in the world. Did Uber really need thei…
Comment linking /uchat/
on “GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces”Submitted Kraken, an Open Source Peer-to-Peer Docker Registry as a story · 204 points
HN discussion
