Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderPretty much spot on. Local in-kernel file systems are hard, partly because of their essential nature and partly because of their history. A lot of the codebases involved still show their origins on single-core systems and pre-NCQ SATA disks, and the development/testing methods are from the same era. The developers always have time to improve the numbers on some ancient micro-benchmark, but new features often get pushed to the LVM layer (snapshots), languish for ages (unions/overlays), or are simply ignored…
I strongly recommend using Sqlite for your own document format. Sqlite is one of the most well-tested pieces of software on earth and ACID-compliant. You can even make it safer than the default if you don't need maximum performance only need it for storing documents. It is very crash and corruption proof, especially with the full sync option and if you use it from one thread only.
This entire situation is a barely contained disaster. Doing all the steps listed at the top of the article is not only exhausting and error prone, it also dramatically lowers write performance. The most frustrating part is that (as I understand it) SSD and NVME hardware exposes strict read and write ordering to the OS anyway. That would allow file modification code to be written in a way thats both fast and correct. After all, these are the primitives we…
(2015) Previous discussions: - 2015-12-13: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10725859 - 2019-12-01: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674610
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 3
- Total points
- 766
- Total comments
- 230
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-12-13 | Files Are HardFirst breakout · Best thread | pyb | 451 | 151 |
| 2017-11-22 | File crash consistency and filesystems are hard | JoshTriplett | 4 | 0 |
| 2018-03-30 | File consistency (2015) | navinsylvester | 127 | 26 |
| 2019-12-01 | Files Are Hard (2015)Latest 20+ point return | signa11 | 170 | 50 |
| 2021-03-23 | Files Are HardHall induction | mzs | 2 | 1 |
| 2021-08-17 | Files Are Hard (2015) | yagizdegirmenci | 3 | 1 |
| 2022-08-13 | Files Are Hard | eis | 5 | 1 |
| 2022-08-24 | Files Are Hard (2015) | s17n | 4 | 0 |