Top all-time · #14961
Alex Becker
Personal blog · alexcbecker.net/blog · on HN as alexbeckerprogrammingwebai
Alex Becker's personal blog at alexcbecker.net covers programming, web and ai. Since 2015, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Django is Terrible”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alex Becker's site for its anime rankings essay, a post about his problems with Django, and projects such as storing data in GIFs. One commenter called the rankings essay well worth reading.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Django is Terrible2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-11-23
What Hacker News says?
While I agree with Maciej's central point, I think the inside arguments he presents are pretty weak. I think that AI risk is not a pressing concern even if you grant the AI risk crowd's assumptions. Elided from https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#against-ai-risk : The real AI risk isn't an all-powerful savant which misinterprets a command to "make everyone on Earth happy" and destroys the Earth. It's a military AI tha…
Comment linking /blog.html
on “Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People”Submitted Django is Terrible as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI left math after college for software engineering, but reading A Mathematicians Lament recently re-kindled my love for it. It is tragic how intuition, technique and mental models are left out of modern mathematics education and writing. It occurred to me that while I learned in college how to show, using Galois theory, that quintic equations are not generally solvable by radicals, I had no idea how Galois theory re…
Comment linking /mathematics.html
on “How to Study Mathematics (2017)”Submitted The Hard Problem of Prompt Injection as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm working on _prompt injection_, the problem where LLMs can't reliably distinguish between the user's instructions and untrusted content like web search results. Just published a blog post a few minutes ago: https://alexcbecker.net/blog/prompt-injection-benchmark.html
Comment linking /blog/prompt-injection-benchmark.html
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)”Submitted Show HN: Learn how mouse events in browsers work as a story · 4 points
HN discussionLately I've been trying to detect/mitigate prompt injection attacks. Wrote a blog post about why it's hard: https://alexcbecker.net/blog/prompt-injection.html
Comment linking /blog/prompt-injection.html
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)”Submitted Claude Changes My Code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI don't remember running into any of these issues learning Django or maintaining a Django codebase, but I've written the problems I ran into: https://alexcbecker.net/blog/django-is-dangerous.html In general, I think Django makes it way too easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
Comment linking /blog/django-is-dangerous.html
on “Django Newbie Mistakes”Submitted You Are Probably Misusing Opacity as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's not just incomes, it seems like news articles almost always use averages no matter how inappropriate they are. I've complained about this at some length: https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#the-cult-of-averages
Comment linking /blog.html
on “To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors”They seem to be moving towards saner form rendering [0], which is nice. And they fixed at least one of their numerous footguns [1]. But I still think Django has too many footguns to be used for important projects [2]. [0] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/ref/forms/renderers/ [1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/releases/1.11/#querys... [2] https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#django-is-terrible
Comment linking /blog.html
on “Django 1.11 Released”I find the HTTP/HTTPS "ring-fence" or "oil/water boundary", as he describes it, to be the most frustrating aspect of HTTPS, and recently wrote about it in some more detail (and how it might be fixed): https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#towards-universal-https-ad...
Comment linking /blog.html
on “TLS Everywhere, not https: URIs (2015)”He recently did write a blog post about his problems with Django: https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html
Comment linking /blog.html
on “Channels adopted as an official Django project”He explains the rationale behind his rankings here: https://alexcbecker.net/anime.html#puella-magi-madoka-magica You can also just scroll down on the ranking page. Well worth reading. He laments that we as a society have lost our appetite for great media. Adroit exploration of a conceptual space, which is what One Punch Man does so incredibly well, is a feature of goodness, but it needs more to elevate it to true gr…
Comment linking /anime.html
on “The State of Python Packaging”Location: Chicago, IL Remote: No Willing to relocate: Yes Languages: C, Haskell, Python, Java, Awk, Javascript, Bash, Golang, PHP Technologies: AWS, Apache, Git, Django, MySQL Website/Portfolio: http://alexcbecker.net/programming.html Email: acbecker@uchicago.edu I'm primarily a backend developer specializing in algorithm design and implementation, but I've been working my way steadily towards full-stack.
Comment linking /programming.html
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2015)”Django is great for fast prototyping if you need very dynamic pages (because views written in Python are so powerful), a complex site structure (because it has excellent url routing), and lots of database interaction (because of the ORM). If you only need the first two, I recommend Flask instead. But be careful if you intend to create a stable, heavily-used site. I have so many problems with Django in this use case…
Comment linking /blog.html
on “Ask HN: Why should I use Django?”Sage is definitely not the easiest thing to use, but it's a great way to 1) actually get your math right and 2) record and share your work. I used it to work out the cubic formula and share it alongside a blog post: https://alexcbecker.net/mathematics.html#the-quadratic-equat...
Comment linking /mathematics.html
on “Computational Mathematics with SageMath (2018)”Somebody wrote a file encoder to take advantage of Flickr's free photo storage, too (though based on its Github repo I don't think a ton of people used it): https://alexcbecker.net/projects.html#storing-data-in-gifs
Comment linking /projects.html
on “YouTube as Storage”