Top all-time · #3627
Austin G. Walters
Personal blog · austingwalters.com · on HN as lettergramprogrammingwriting
Austin G. Walters's personal blog at austingwalters.com covers programming and writing. Since 2013, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 346 times, most often “Fast Full-Text Search in PostgreSQL”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Austin G. Walters' posts on building a browser, full-text search in Postgres, cost per calorie from a vending machine, and firearms statistics. The comments cite or link them without judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
(last updated March 2020) Meta Data: Name: Austin Grant Walters Expertise: Management, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Full-Stack Engineering Preferred Programming Languages: Python, Ruby, Golang, C, C++ Frameworks: Rails, Tensorflow, Keras, OpenCV, Qt, Flask, Django, PostgreSQL Positions: Staff
Most-linked posts?
- Fast Full-Text Search in PostgreSQL4 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2018-08-29
- COVID19 Vaccine Deaths and Risks3 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2021-06-12
- The Last Free Generation (2018)3 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-11-06
- Export a Command Line CURL Command to an Executable3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-05-25
- I/O Multiplexing using epoll and kqueue System Calls3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-05-14
- Is Search Solved?2 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-01-25
- Increasing Battery Life on an Arch Linux Laptop (ThinkPad T14s)2 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-07-28
- Firearms by the Numbers2 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-10-28
- /chromatags/2 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-11-20
- Tiny Handcuffs2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-12-09
What Hacker News says?
Interestingly enough, I've been frustrated by this for years https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/ I used to manage hnprofile.com which utilized a patent I wrote to target this exact problem. Effectively, Google optimizes for ads (as pointed out) and optimizes to ensure you have to click multiple links. In reality, we want to answer peoples question(s) right off the bat, i.e. no ads. How do you make money the…
Comment linking /is-search-solved/
on “Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories”Submitted Introduction to Markov Processes as a story · 55 points
HN discussionFunny enough I just wrote about some of this myself - perhaps it’s that time of year: https://austingwalters.com/tiny-handcuffs/
Comment linking /tiny-handcuffs/
on “Having Kids”Submitted The Last Free Generation (2018) as a story · 52 points
HN discussionEven back in 2014, I was developing my own browser with webkit: https://austingwalters.com/simple-web-browser-in-cpp-using-q... Works on any OS I've tried.
Comment linking /simple-web-browser-in-cpp-using-qt/
on “Firefox 70”Submitted A letter from my congressman as a story · 44 points
HN discussionAccording to the current administration gun violence is a public health crisis: https://efsgv.org/learn/learn-more-about-gun-violence/public... I present arguments that could be considered "misleading" based on the administrations official position. Personally, I'd like to actually fix the issues, to do so, we need to discuss the issues. With that, I wrote something we can use as a framework to discuss the issues. -…
Comment linking /firearms-by-the-numbers/
on “Google Drive bans distribution of “misleading content””Submitted Please Excuse my Grammar as a story · 42 points
HN discussionInteresting... so I wrote a wrote an article on gun violence https://austingwalters.com/firearms-by-the-numbers/ Guess it contradicts the official position of the current administration (not reality). So will my drive content be removed? Similarly, I have been monitoring the CDC change the covid19 deaths rate over time. https://austingwalters.com/changes-in-the-cdc-counts-of-deat... It appears the CDC had been inacc…
Comment linking /changes-in-the-cdc-counts-of-deaths-by-state-and-select-causes/
on “Google Drive bans distribution of “misleading content””Submitted The Cache and Multithreading as a story · 36 points
HN discussionFrankly. Most people on HN and the tech community have asked for this, it's been years in the making. Slowly, anyone watching has seen this coming and it's not the end. There's a reason we (the tech community) used to be and generally do lean libertarian. It's because we had to think ahead as we program, develop, we used to be innovators. We had to accepted people like Richard Stallman or Steve Jobs for that matter,…
Comment linking /on-committing-suicide/
on “I Violated a Code of Conduct”Submitted Templating in Go as a story · 31 points
HN discussionOf my past 10 posts on HN 6 have been flagged and removed by users. Of those, many made it to the front page with 10+ votes. I contacted Dang and he was clear it was users censoring it, further that some users were also "vouching" for my posts. It's to the point, people don't want to know. I feel I'm fairly even handed in my discussion. Here's a couple of my posts (who knows if I'll get flagged): - Public Safety Ann…
Comment linking /update-the-dead-vote-in-michigan/
on “‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies”Submitted Trends on Hacker News: Programming Languages and Tools as a story · 28 points
HN discussion"Hosting" your own blog takes around an hour of setup for wordpress or github pages. Personally, I use vultr + wordpress for my blog[1], but I have technical expertise - it took only 30 minutes to setup and transfer from my previous provider. Reason I like to host my own, is I control the content, the popups, the UI, etc. If you care about that, host it yourself. Medium is there to make money, we can't fault them fo…
Comment linking /
on “Medium is a poor choice for blogging”Submitted Abstract Libraries in Go as a story · 28 points
HN discussionI recently wrote a blog about “Dutch Oven Fried Chicken”[1], I don’t think it’s particularly interesting and anyone can do it. However, now I can send a link to a friend and go back and make the recipe myself. Blogging for me isn’t about popularity. It’s about being able to share ones ideas and document your interests. I send links to my blog all the time, because I wrote about topics I found challenging / fun. I do…
Comment linking /learning-through-blogging/
on “Have a personal web site”Submitted Firearms by the Numbers as a story · 26 points
HN discussionI did something similar for universities, to help students select their courses: https://easy-a.net/ I wrote a blog post about it, because it requires a ton of work to get FOIA requested data - this I'm assuming was done in the same painstaking way: https://austingwalters.com/foia-requesting-100-universities/ I give this props. I'm sure it required a ton of work
Comment linking /foia-requesting-100-universities/
on “Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets”Submitted Stagflation Is Here – Monetary Inflation and Economic Depression as a story · 24 points
HN discussionI actually postulate it was due to their ability to parse queries in an effective way, combined with the speed (and sure, probably design) of results [1]. From what I recall at the time, and even to this day, Google does a better job of determine exact match vs question (and finding subject matter) based results. [1] https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/
Comment linking /is-search-solved/
on “DuckDuckGo Raises $10M”Submitted I/O multiplexing using epoll and kqueue system calls as a story · 24 points
HN discussionI had the same result from most papers. My personal conclusion is that when people get a winning strategy they don’t publish. I personally put my money where my mouth was for a few years: https://austingwalters.com/backtesting-our-100-yoy-profit-ge... That being said, I try to be honest too. This can disappear any time and the model I use may only be good in this environment. I do not know. I think that’s the challe…
Comment linking /backtesting-our-100-yoy-profit-generating-strategy/
on “I've reproduced 130 research papers about “predicting the stock market””Submitted How I Made Over 100% YoY Profit Investing as a story · 18 points
HN discussionThe main reason the homes are being bought up is the lumber and steal costs. Right now, it would cost me $500k to build a house that last year would cost me $190k. Real quotes I got for a possible build. More details on what I’m seeing here: https://austingwalters.com/stagflation-is-here-monetary-infl... With that being the case and the dollar appearing to be weakening, it makes since for them to buy anything they c…
Comment linking /stagflation-is-here-monetary-inflation-economic-depression/
on “If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund”Submitted On Committing Suicide as a story · 15 points
HN discussionI actually built a search engine back in 2018 using postgresql https://austingwalters.com/fast-full-text-search-in-postgres... Worked quite well and still use it daily. Basically doing weighted searches on vectors is slower than my approach, but definitely good enough. Currently, I can search around 50m HN & Reddit comments in 200ms on the postgresql running on my machine.
Comment linking /fast-full-text-search-in-postgresql/
on “Postgres Full-Text Search: A search engine in a database”Submitted Building a Web Server in Go: Handling User Input as a story · 15 points
HN discussionAnd this is only the beginning... if you look for projections (or run your own [1]), we will need a hard nationwide shutdown for at least 2-3 months (not 2 weeks) for this to not kill a million plus Americans. I suspect even if a shutdown is lifted, when people start seeing body counts it’s not like they’ll return to traveling or eating out. We’d probably need to see an anti-body test first and/or vaccine. This is g…
Comment linking /covid-19-vs-the-economy/
on “3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits”Submitted Mapping Arbitrary Points to Arbitrary Words in Text as a story · 14 points
HN discussion
