HackerTube / Video
Zebras All the Way Down - Bryan Cantrill, Uptime 2017
Code & Supply
Bryan Cantrill's Uptime 2017 talk on the engineering challenges of the stateful data path, including storage, firmware and hardware bugs. It uses the 'zebras vs. horses' diagnostic heuristic to explain why rare failures keep appearing.
A perennial HN favorite whenever firmware, disks, ECC or opaque hardware come up, valued as both entertaining and sobering.
18 Hacker News mentions · 2018–2025