Top all-time · #11865
Alex Beal
Personal blog · usrsb.inprogrammingsecuritymath
Alex Beal writes /usr/sbin/blog, a personal blog at usrsb.in about programming, security and math. Since 2012, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 26 times, most often “Selling Laziness”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for a Haskell implementation of Unix core utilities. The only comment discusses C code readability and cites a different article on K&R-style argument parsing, not the linked writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Selling Laziness2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-01-26
- Symbolic Execution: Intuition and Implementation2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-06
- Tracking the Mailbox App Reservation System2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-02-12
What Hacker News says?
People who write C nowadays generally try to write it in the most "boring" and easy-to-read way possible, I think. But C can also be hard to understand if it uses a lot of side-effectful expressions and pointer arithmetic. Just look at "How Old School C Programmers Process Arguments", which looks over an excerpt from K&R [0]. To make your code slightly harder to read, while still being plausible, you could change it…
Comment linking /How-Old-School-C-Programmers-Process-Arguments.html
on “Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell”Submitted Symbolic Execution: Intuition and Implementation as a story · 150 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Old School C Programmers Process Arguments as a story · 115 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tracking the Mailbox App Reservation System as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bouncing Python's Generators With a Trampoline as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tracking and Graphing My Place in the Tempo Reservation Line as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Copying Strings in One Line (C Programming) (2011) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Memento Mori as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What I Learned Participating in My First Kaggle Competition as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Probability of a Correct Program as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Flexibility In Type Systems as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Backing Up Sensitive Data With Secret Sharing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted How A Computer Learned To Play Pac-Man as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A New Way of Keeping Time: The Angelean Calendar as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted My Social Network as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Symbolic Execution: Intuition and Implementation as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Laziness and Parallelism as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Selling Laziness as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Selling Laziness as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Learning Deep Learning as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Org-mode: An integrated language and editor as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted MoodBot: A Long Term Mood Tracking Project as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Types As Specification as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Distributed Systems Under Attack: Bitcoin and the Internet as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tracking the Mailbox App Reservation System as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Picking Colors Optimally: An Optimization Problem in Python as a story · 1 points
HN discussion