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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

The submitted title ("Cache invalidation might no longer be a hard thing in Computer Science") broke the site guidelines badly. They say:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Editorializing the original title to make it more linkbait is going the wrong way down a one-way street. Please don't.

(If you're the author, then please either use the original title or, if it's linkbait, change the HN title to make it less so.)

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Accepted. Just to be clear, it’s not a link bait as far as I understand it for two reasons 1. I am dead serious about making cache invalidation a simpler problem 2. “Cache invalidation might no longer be a hard problem in Computer Science” is the subtitle of the corresponding systems @scale talk I just gave.

I respect the guidelines and I am OK with the rename. I just want to clarify that I don’t think the old title is misleading.

It's still massively click-bait until such time as the claim isn't pure speculation. Also, casually optimistic claims about complex and hard problems are the essence of click-bait. There isn't much unique about your instance of it

> until such time as the claim isn't pure speculation

Which I don't think it is.

> casually optimistic claims about complex and hard problems are the essence of click-bait

A group of people at Facebook worked on this for many years. TAO and Memcache serves quadrillions of queries a day. I wanted to make this claim – cache invalidation might no longer be a hard problem in Computer Science – years ago; but I didn't because I don't want to jump the gun. We baked the solution for years. There's nothing casual about this.

Just about all papers and write-ups that describe big advances on important problems aren't titled 'Big advance in Problem X' or 'X now an ex-problem'.

This is a fair point. Lesson learned. Thank you :D

Small comment of appreciation for your attitude and quick adjustment, nice to see on the internet!

Agreed. Gracefully handled. I happened to agree with the arguments, but treasure civil discourse.

Don't be too hard on yourself, naming submissions is still a hard problem.

"Finally, we are building a high-level consistency API for distributed systems — think of C++’s std::memory_order, but for distributed systems."

Will you be writing this up as well? It's very ambitious!

I am glad you caught that! I am personally very very excited about this. Because if you think about it, distributed systems and cache coherence problems on a multi-core system are essentially the same thing.

If C++'s memory model can abstract away multiple cachelines, why can't we steal the idea and abstract away distributed system details? The single keyword of distributed systems is "order". And that's exactly what `std::memory_order` captures, which is not a coincidence.

You can DM me and I would love to chat. I am @uvdn7 on twitter.

As far as I'm concerned I haven't seen any change.

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