171–180 of 203 posts
Best stack cloud providers don't want you to know about, /dev/null for db and https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode for the backend.
In a similar vein, this is one of the most interesting things I’ve come across on HN over the years: https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/pipelogic/index.php Past HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15363029
It's also horizontally scalable: https://gist.github.com/raggi/560087#file-shardnull
I understand this is supposed to be satire, but IMHO a well-executed joke should still be well-written and easy to follow. This " unless " is just terrible to read, and I can't even tell if FFI is necessary here, or a part of the joke. Funny not funny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-only_memory_(joke)
See the datasheet also, I especially like the "insertions vs number of remaining pins" chart:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120316141638/http://www.nation...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only bug with it was due to my own stupidity. I wanted a quick way to see how fast a drive was, thus sending one of its large files to /dev/null was fine. Except I went too fast and cp'd the file to /dev/null. It took a while before noticing I had no more /dev/null on the machine (read: the time needed to fill the rootfs). In a panic, I removed the file. Seeing the machine collapse due to /dev/null missing was fu…
Wait, you can actually remove /dev/null? I always thought of it as a special driver file I guess that might not be true for all nixes out there
You can recreate it with 'mknod /dev/null c 1 3; chmod 666 /dev/null'.
The '1 3' are the major and minor device numbers, respectively, which are assigned / maintained by LANA, the Linux Assigned Numbers Authority.
And the production of articles is about right too.
. "Hello World" - The start of something great. [Dec 2024]
. "Comparison is the Thief of Joy" - Link to another article. [Apr 2025]
. "/dev/null is an ACID compliant database" - Funny, insightful. [Aug 2025]
Funny post though, good read!
Can it rollback transactions?