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begriffs.com
Personal blog · begriffs.comprogrammingmath
begriffs.com is a personal blog at begriffs.com about programming and math. Since 2014, 81 different Hacker News readers have linked it 183 times, most often “PostgreSQL Domain Integrity in Depth”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link begriffs.com for its C, Unicode with ICU, PostgreSQL and linear-algebra posts. Commenters call several interesting or worth reading, and one flags a misfiled book.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- The site is liked; posts called interesting, great or worth watching, incl. Postgres validation and regex talks.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- PostgreSQL Domain Integrity in Depth6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-10-22
- History and Effective Use of Vim6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-07-19
- Mailing lists vs Github5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-06-05
- User-defined Order in SQL5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-03-21
- Unicode programming, with examples in C4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-05-22
- Good books for deep hacks4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-04-18
- The Design and Use of QuickCheck4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-01-16
- Dynamic Linking Best Practices4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-07-04
- Pleasant Debugging with GDB and DDD4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-07-17
- Concurrent Programming, with Examples4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-03-24
What Hacker News says?
It's been amazing following all the progress so far. I'm a proud $5/mo sponsor and look forward to writing something in Zig soon! Are there any concurrency constructs provided by the language yet? I'm just starting to learn how to do concurrency in lower-level langauges (with mutexes and spinlocks and stuff). I'm coming from the world of Python where my experience with concurrent state is limited to simple row-level…
Comment linking /posts/2020-03-23-concurrent-programming.html
on “Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang”Submitted History and Effective Use of Vim as a story · 593 points
HN discussionYour best bet is probably to use a library like ICU. Here are examples of working with unicode in C: https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-05-23-unicode-icu.html
Comment linking /posts/2019-05-23-unicode-icu.html
on “Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C”Submitted SQL Keys in Depth as a story · 435 points
HN discussionSuch a great collection! I like https://begriffs.com Does anyone know any tool that will mass bookmark links on a page?
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Concurrent Programming, with Examples as a story · 330 points
HN discussionThis is an interesting read on validation in postgres: https://begriffs.com/posts/2017-10-21-sql-domain-integrity.h...
Comment linking /posts/2017-10-21-sql-domain-integrity.html
on “PostgREST”Submitted User-defined Order in SQL as a story · 314 points
HN discussionHow do you easely piece together a (poerfull) rest api just by having the definitions of the tables in the database? Very very old videos but you can get the core idea https://begriffs.com/posts/2014-12-30-intro-to-postgrest.htm... https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-03-20-postgrest-tour.html
Comment linking /posts/2016-03-20-postgrest-tour.html
on “PostgREST”Submitted Good books for deep hacks as a story · 296 points
HN discussionI get that you're just trying to get your software out there, but your modern features that email doesn't support are just wrong. >shared history Not if you have a mailing list, and then going off the record is as easy as removing the mailing list from the CC field. >markdown formatting This is an implementation failure, not really a fundamental problem with email. There is no reason that email clients don't support…
Comment linking /posts/2020-07-16-generating-mime-email.html
on “If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room”Submitted C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines as a story · 270 points
HN discussion> If your buffer isn't a NUL-terminated, then don't call a function that is only defined for NUL-terminated buffers. It's not that people want to pass strncpy source buffers that lack NUL termination, it's that strncpy in certain situations will not NUL terminate its results. https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-01-19-inside-c-standard-lib.... > some people claim strlcpy() is 'broken' Speaking of strlcpy, it thankfully d…
Comment linking /posts/2019-01-19-inside-c-standard-lib.html
on “Banned C standard library functions in Git source code”Submitted Practical Guide to SQL Transaction Isolation as a story · 230 points
HN discussionOP has an extravagant threat model. Yeah if I were trying to hide communications from some dictator where even the metadata of recipient and timestamp is damning then of course email is out. PGP is a good way to communicate under the right circumstances. Say I'm writing to someone I trust and have verified their key fingerprint via a secure channel (in person, over the phone, etc). If I were sending them login crede…
Comment linking /posts/2016-11-05-advanced-intro-gnupg.html
on “Stop Using Encrypted Email”Submitted Going “Write-Only” as a story · 230 points
HN discussion> DDD is still maintained? Absolutely. I wrote about its features here https://begriffs.com/posts/2022-07-17-debugging-gdb-ddd.html Since the article was written, the maintainers fixed the issues I pointed out. No need for many of those workarounds now. Versions 3.4.0 and 3.4.1 are substantial.
Comment linking /posts/2022-07-17-debugging-gdb-ddd.html
on “Seer: A GUI front end to GDB for Linux”Submitted The real responsive design challenge is RSS as a story · 221 points
HN discussionPostgreSQL supports deferring constraints. https://begriffs.com/posts/2017-08-27-deferrable-sql-constra...
Comment linking /posts/2017-08-27-deferrable-sql-constraints.html
on “We do not use foreign keys (2016)”Submitted Making 20% Time Work as a story · 214 points
HN discussion> After doing that book I wanted to see what other books were out there, which ones were the good ones, and sort of classify them. I came up with this list: https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-07-24-best-linear-algebra-bo... Ironically you put "Jänich, K. (1994). Linear algebra. New York: Springer-Verlag." into the "Theoretical" section: In Germany this book (its German original) is not that well-regarded, since it is c…
Comment linking /posts/2016-07-24-best-linear-algebra-books.html
on “Fundamentals of Linear Algebra and Optimization [pdf]”Submitted Inside the C Standard Library as a story · 206 points
HN discussionI think the book you're talking about is Axler's "Linear Algebra Done Right." I worked through the problems in this book with some friends, and it is a very good presentation. After doing that book I wanted to see what other books were out there, which ones were the good ones, and sort of classify them. I came up with this list: https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-07-24-best-linear-algebra-bo... I classify the books as…
Comment linking /posts/2016-07-24-best-linear-algebra-books.html
on “Fundamentals of Linear Algebra and Optimization [pdf]”Submitted An Advanced Intro to GnuPG as a story · 177 points
HN discussionAs I got more into C programming, I started looking for data structure libraries. Found a few [0]. Also evaluated sc, but it had too much pre-processor magic for my taste. It also bundles random "stuff" like a URI parser, a thread abstraction, etc. Eventually I rolled my own [1] more focused library. It's basic and portable. 0: https://begriffs.com/posts/2020-08-31-portable-stable-softwa... 1: https://github.com/beg…
Comment linking /posts/2020-08-31-portable-stable-software.html
on “Common libraries and data structures for C”Submitted Unicode programming, with examples in C as a story · 175 points
HN discussionI'm a big fan of taking advantage of laziness and think it's drastically underrated. It's incredibly expressive and it's what really makes Haskell more than just an ML variant. I gave a slightly rough talk about "Thinking with Laziness"[1] which tries to capture how expressive it can be. I'm a big fan and sad that so many people are willing to categorically dismiss it as a wart in Haskell. [1]: https://begriffs.com/…
Comment linking /posts/2015-06-17-thinking-with-laziness.html
on “Develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris”Submitted History and effective use of Vim (2019) as a story · 170 points
HN discussionMore unicode, in more minutes: https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-05-23-unicode-icu.html
Comment linking /posts/2019-05-23-unicode-icu.html
on “Unicode in five minutes (2013)”Submitted Purely Functional Linux with NixOS [video] as a story · 169 points
HN discussion
