Debugging Your Operating System: A Lesson in Memory Allocation | Hacker News Reader

Debugging Your Operating System: A Lesson in Memory Allocation

lukasa.co.uk

63 pointsjsnell6 comments

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13141912 because of an annoying limitation of our software. It keeps about 3 days' worth of stories in RAM, which means that if we re-up a post from 3 days ago (as explained below), we're taking a chance with it no longer appearing on the front page, which is computed from RAM. Someone will now ask why we don't 'just' (<-- I call it the J-word) keep everything in RAM since how much data can HN possibly have, and my answer will be first a mad cackle of exasperation, followed by the info that we have lots of memory we don't get to use because garbage collector, and that we're working on a fix but it's a medium term kind of thing that we work on when we can.

OT: It looks like this is posted for the 4th time now: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lukasa.co.uk

If you check the id numbers, you'll see that this was actually the first time it was posted :-P

HN moderators will occasionally give stories that didn't get a lot of traction a second chance. To prevent people from wondering why a week old submission is on the front page, it'll show up with a fresh timestamp.

This is what happened to remarkable this week.

HN basically a blog now. People can submit stuff but there is no consistency about anything.

jsnell's correct, and I'll add that reposts are ok on HN if an article hasn't had significant attention yet. 23 points and no comments (which a previous submission had) would normally count as significant attention, but we sometimes relax the criteria when an article is substantive and seems likely to interest the community.

When we put stories in the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and earlier posts linked from there), we try to pick the original submission as the one that reaps the benefit.

I've marked this off-topic; now somebody post some relevant comments about operating systems and memory allocation so it has a bottom to sink to :)

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