That is so fetch!

In all honesty though, I quite enjoyed how this article was written. Is there a listing somewhere of articles written like this, with algorithms or concepts explained using analogies to pop culture?

Submodular optimization explained through "Gossip Girl" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ3ErkmUpLU

Not what you asked for but you may enjoy Pitch Perfect 237: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiC9X_MoE1M

The guy has a point

Stop trying to make fetch happen.

As a lover or Raft Consensus Algorithm, now I have to watch Mean Girls I guess.

Which movie would you use to explain Paxos?

"Chat generate a blog post on paxos but explain it through Mad Max: Fury Road"

The Postman (1997)

restoration of packet messaging across unreliable transport.

I looked through the gifs and ended up understanding even less than before.

“Chat generate me an explanation blog posts on the Raft consensus algorithm… but explain it through mean girls”

It's from 2019, it predates ChatGPT and co. Your comment and criticism is not valid.

Is that your real take? The girls have the power in that movie they manipulate the boys not the other way around. The adults are oblivious (except for Tina). There is no patriarchy.

You're a virgin who can't drive!

Admittedly, this is Clueless (and way harsh) .. but I couldn't help myself.

This is another way of telling us you haven't seen the movie without telling us you haven't seen the movie.

It ably demonstrates the propensity of IT industry drive by commenters to be confidently, totally, utterly incorrect in every aspect of what they opine.

At the risk of going even more off-topic:

> Mean Girls demonstrate how patriarchy shapes young girls, [...]

Of course, young girls have no agency and the only thing shaping them is the mean patriarchy... /s

Supposedly having no agency and being opressed seems to be the universal narrative, even with groups that are not even a minority. It gets worse with real minorities. But I know an increasing number of women who are fed up with this victimhood mentality. Its a slipery slope. Because once you believe in you being a victim, you likely reduce your effort to take matters into your own hand. And there is even a feedback loop. Because once you start whining, people perceive you as such and a stereotype is reinforced.

Those people are a good candidates for the burn book.

They need to stop trying to make fetch a thing.

lmao, i love this

Previously:

Raft Is So Fetch: The Raft Consensus Algorithm Explained Through Mean Girls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33071069 - Oct 2022 (53 comments)

Raft Is So Fetch: The Raft Consensus Algorithm Explained Through Mean Girls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22520040 - March 2020 (4 comments)

But why?

Given that Raft was rederived simply because the authors couldn’t originally understand Paxos, I’m not surprised to see this.

As someone who doesn't know/watched "Mean Girls" this seems confusing. Also I don't think it is fair to assume that reading of a blog post makes one to understand Raft better, at best they pique one's interest to learn more about it. IMHO Reading/re-reading of the Raft paper and working through an instructional implementation like (https://github.com/eliben/raft) provides a better understanding.

It’s not explaining any deep technical details. Think of it as a gentle introduction to the idea for someone to explain why they might want to read the paper, before reading the paper.

If the article was intended to be an intro to "Raft" algorithm I would've agreed with your sentiment. But this is what the article starts with:

  Understanding Raft can be tough. In fact, I’ve seen   conversations recently on social media in which actual technical leaders of infrastructure companies demonstrate a lack of understanding (!). Point being, you’re not alone.

Anyway I now notice that the article was written in 2023, probably I'm being too pedantic.

I think the point being made (I’m not the author after all) is not that they are misunderstanding how Raft achieves consensus, but what it means in the first place when we speak of it doing so and why that’s useful. By “technical leaders” here, one might think of CTOs, directors, and senior managers over technical teams rather than senior ICs.

This is a great teaching format. The hardest part of Raft isn't leader election — it's explaining why you need a majority quorum in the first place.

I recently worked through a project where the "quorum" number had to come from physics rather than being picked by the team. We ended up using sin²θ₁₂ ≈ 30.9% (the solar neutrino mixing angle) which is way lower than Raft's 51%, but the tradeoff is that proposals go through a 21-day challenge period with veto rights. Different safety model, but it forced us to think hard about what "agreement" actually means when you can't use a simple majority.

Mean Girls → Raft is exactly the level of analogy this topic needs.

bot, or someone heavily using an LLM. all 26 “papers” listed on orcid were written in 2026 and “published” on zenodo