Top all-time · #2522
Antonio Cangiano
Personal blog · programmingzen.comprogrammingaibusiness
Antonio Cangiano writes Programming Zen, a personal blog at programmingzen.com about programming, ai and business. Since 2010, 29 different Hacker News readers have linked it 126 times, most often “The Great Ruby Shootout (July 2010)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Programming Zen is a blog about programming and emerging technologies, authored by Antonio Cangiano, a Software Development Manager and AI Evangelist at IBM.
Most-linked posts?
- The Great Ruby Shootout (July 2010)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2010-07-19
- The Best Ruby on Rails Books2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-12-20
- The pursuit of excellence in programming2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-07-05
- /2010/05/16/benchmarking-macruby-0-6/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-07-19
- /wp-content/uploads/2011/11/does-success-depend-on-forces-outside-our-control-e1320936286945.png2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-11-10
- Data Scientist Workbench: IBM’s All-In-One Tool for Data Scientists2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-04-12
- A Language for the Next 10 Years2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-14
- Thoughts on Clojure2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-07-09
What Hacker News says?
I work at a very large company (IBM) and I refuse to interview people that way. My track record for great hires (both full-timers and interns) is arguably impeccable. No whiteboard or brain teaser quizzes involved. I wrote a little about my interviewing approach in my latest "hiring" post: https://programmingzen.com/new-ibm-internship-positions-in-m...
Comment linking /new-ibm-internship-positions-in-my-team/
on “The Lesson to Unlearn”Submitted On the Usability of Codecademy as a story · 253 points
HN discussionI covered some aspects of it in an old article of mine: http://programmingzen.com/2009/07/27/why-technical-marketing...
Comment linking /2009/07/27/why-technical-marketing-is-important-for-programmers/
on “Khan of Khan Academy at TED (video)”Submitted Exploring Mathematics with Matplotlib and Python as a story · 156 points
HN discussionYou are comparing yourself to the entire HN community: a young man against thousands of years of collective experience. I suspect the reason why you do this is because you give your "talent" more value than you should. You wrote this: > HN shows me all these people and ideas that are succeeding. It used to be inspirational, but now it's frightening. > I've always been told I'm a smart kid, and that I'll be a million…
Comment linking /2010/07/04/the-pursuit-of-excellence-in-programming/
on “Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?”Submitted Programming is a Super Power as a story · 127 points
HN discussionI have a P51, and I just bought a Pixelbook because the P51 is a great machine but not really a laptop. See here: https://programmingzen.com/google-pixelbook-review/
Comment linking /google-pixelbook-review/
on “The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be”Submitted The Strange Case of John Dillinger and the Fraudulent Apple ID as a story · 119 points
HN discussionIn the programmingzen blog, Antonio Cangiano, a ruby programmer and author of several ruby books, there is a post about an interview for a job at IBM in which the question is to explain how the red-black tree algorithm works. Hey, I googled for it, here it is: http://programmingzen.com/things-ive-learned-from-hiring-int...
Comment linking /things-ive-learned-from-hiring-interns-for-ibm/
on “I spent three months working full time to get a job”Submitted The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game as a story · 98 points
HN discussion> I guess since benchmarks are not completely worthless, The original keeps getting re-iterated: http://programmingzen.com/2007/11/28/holy-shmoly-ruby-19-smo... The original author, on a basis of a fib benchmark, concludes ruby 1.9 is faster - that is as flawed as it gets. Did you try running with Python 3? You will get around the same time as you get with Python 2.7. Pick anything from here http://shootout.alioth.d…
Comment linking /2007/11/28/holy-shmoly-ruby-19-smokes-python-away/
on “PHP is much better than what you think”Submitted Thoughts on Clojure as a story · 93 points
HN discussionI expressed similar thoughts in the past: http://programmingzen.com/2010/12/28/give-your-programmers-p... It just doesn't make sense to cheap out on these things. If you do because you can't afford it for every developer, then you don't have enough money to employ that many developers.
Comment linking /2010/12/28/give-your-programmers-professional-tools/
on “The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One”Submitted The Great Ruby Shootout (July 2010) as a story · 74 points
HN discussionAt the moment I make most of my non-day-job income from my two blogs [1][2], and Any New Books? [3]. All together they make me over $5000 on a good month. The two blogs didn't make money initially because I wasn't interested in monetizing them when I started years ago. ANB made its first dollar on day one. [1] http://programmingzen.com [2] http://math-blog.com [3] http://anynewbooks.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income?”Submitted How to setup Clojure from scratch as a story · 66 points
HN discussion"JRuby is much much faster than 1.8." Why are we even comparing JRuby and Ruby 1.8? Ruby 1.9.3 is the last version and Ruby 1.9 is much faster than Ruby 1.8. In a benchmark from last year JRuby and 1.9 were about equally fast with 1.9 the winner in most cases. With the recent improvements in JRuby I believe JRuby is faster but I have no idea about how much. http://programmingzen.com/2010/07/19/the-great-ruby-shootou…
Comment linking /2010/07/19/the-great-ruby-shootout-july-2010/
on “Charlie Nutter's Response to "Why Not A Bytecode Vm"”Submitted How Microsoft is changing the programming world as a story · 55 points
HN discussionI published a Ruby version here: http://programmingzen.com/2011/06/02/10-ruby-one-liners-to-i...
Comment linking /2011/06/02/10-ruby-one-liners-to-impress-your-friends/
on “CoffeeScript One Liners”Submitted A Review of the TV Show Start-Ups: Silicon Valley as a story · 46 points
HN discussionThe included Pew center graph is powerful. And fascinating: http://programmingzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/does-su... Interesting to see South Korea near the right side, rather than closer to Japan.
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2011/11/does-success-depend-on-forces-outside-our-control-e1320936286945.png
on “The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game”Submitted A Review of the Amazon Books Store as a story · 45 points
HN discussionThe article focuses on the same things have been hammered on for a while now (other countries do health care better, other countries do education better, other countries do education better...), but I think there's another reason to get out of America: other countries have different cultural strengths . Antonio Cangiano wrote a post a while back about why Italy doesn't do enough startups ( http://programmingzen.com/…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2011/11/does-success-depend-on-forces-outside-our-control-e1320936286945.png
on “To Make America Great Again, We Need to Leave the Country”Submitted The pursuit of excellence in programming as a story · 43 points
HN discussionMy take: - Ruby: http://programmingzen.com/ruby-and-rails-recommended-books/ - Rails: http://programmingzen.com/rails-books/
Comment linking /rails-books/
on “The Ruby Reading List”Submitted Pebble Smartwatch Review: A Useful Dumbwatch as a story · 39 points
HN discussionI agree, and I think MacRuby is a great idea. Ruby in particular is very close to Objective-C in practice, and some of the latest Apple's changes to Objective-C have made it even more so. But as much as I love Ruby, MacRuby is still not that much faster than Ruby and often it is slower [1]. But that said I am not bashing MacRuby: it is still a very young project and it has a lot of potential still untapped. [1] http…
Comment linking /2010/05/16/benchmarking-macruby-0-6/
on “Interest: Senior engineer confirms Apple working on MacRuby for iOS”Submitted Why would you use a commercial database anyway? as a story · 35 points
HN discussionFor a highly successful alternative to giving away the PDF, you can read my interview with Michael Hartl: http://programmingzen.com/2011/03/09/interview-with-michael-...
Comment linking /2011/03/09/interview-with-michael-hartl-author-of-the-rails-3-tutorial/
on “So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?”Submitted In-Depth Book Review: Practical Clojure as a story · 34 points
HN discussion
