Top all-time · #1548
Ben Frederickson
Personal blog · benfrederickson.com/blogprogrammingdata
Ben Frederickson's personal blog at benfrederickson.com covers programming and data. Since 2013, 46 different Hacker News readers have linked it 68 times, most often “All mainstream languages marketed as functional are losing market”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (20) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ben Frederickson's blog for Python and recommender-systems posts, and for data analyses such as GitHub language rankings, robots.txt files and Venn diagram layout.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter says they love reading it, alongside Erik Bernhardsson's blog, for Python and recommender systems.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 20 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- All mainstream languages marketed as functional are losing market6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-07-22
- Finding Where Do the World's Developers Live via GitHub Data5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-04-24
- Ranking Programming Languages by GitHub Users4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-01-25
- Don't Pickle Your Data4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-05-19
- A Better Algorithm for Area Proportional Venn and Euler Diagrams3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-06-28
- People Who Like This Also Like3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-04-27
- Finding Similar Music Using Matrix Factorization3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-05-03
- Writing Python Extensions in Rust Using PyO33 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-06-22
- An Analysis of the World's Leading Robots.txt Files3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-10-20
- GitHub Won’t Help You with Hiring2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-08
What Hacker News says?
I love reading these two for Python/Recommender Systems: 1. Ben Frederickson: https://www.benfrederickson.com/blog/ 2. Erik Bernhardsson: https://erikbern.com/ And for pure ML: 1. Ferenc Huszár: https://www.inference.vc/ 2. John Langford: https://hunch.net (although he hasn't written a technical post in a while)
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?”Submitted Interactive Numerical Optimization Tutorial as a story · 142 points
HN discussion"much faster than Pickle" That isn't saying much, though. https://www.benfrederickson.com/images/python-serialization/...
Comment linking /images/python-serialization/speed.png
on “Apache Arrow 3.0”Submitted Python as a declarative programming language (2017) as a story · 139 points
HN discussionIs it growing? It is a difficult metric to quantify, but looking at thing like Github, or Reddit, it seems flat or declining. Clojure initially benefited as the preferred Java escape path, but it seems like that has been supplanted by Kotlin. https://github.com/oprogramador/github-languages#most-failin... https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-language...
Comment linking /ranking-programming-languages-by-github-users/
on “Elements of Clojure”Submitted Finding Similar Music Using Matrix Factorization as a story · 134 points
HN discussionI analyzed the top 1 million robots.txt files looking for sites that allow google and block everyone else here: https://www.benfrederickson.com/robots-txt-analysis/ - it's a relatively common pattern for major websites
Comment linking /robots-txt-analysis/
on “How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours (2012)”Submitted GitHub Won’t Help You with Hiring as a story · 119 points
HN discussionObjectiveC is slowly dying [1] I think it will flatten out and not go away for a long time but it's going to eventually become and adjunct to Swift 'outside' of Apple. Within 5-7 years Swift will rival ObjC within Apple, and from then on it's hard to tell. There are no foreseeable plans to rewrite the OS, and so ObjC has to stay around, but that's in a clearly limited capacity. [1] https://www.benfrederickson.com/ra…
Comment linking /ranking-programming-languages-by-github-users/
on “Apple’s use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 15”Submitted Building a ‘People Who Like This Also Like’ Feature as a story · 108 points
HN discussionThe majority of software engineers live in California, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, and Texas. https://www.benfrederickson.com/github-developer-locations/ Just curious, what's the latest software startup that's in your words in a flyover state compared to an openai or databricks
Comment linking /github-developer-locations/
on “Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse”Submitted Why GitHub Won't Help with Hiring as a story · 105 points
HN discussionPython surpasses java according to github statistics http://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-languages...
Comment linking /ranking-programming-languages-by-github-users/
on “Python 1.0.0 is out (1994)”Submitted Calculating the intersection area of 3 or more circles as a story · 100 points
HN discussionI also wrote up an analysis of the top 1M robots.txt files: http://www.benfrederickson.com/robots-txt-analysis/ I ended up analyzing very different things from this article though, so this article was still pretty interesting to me.
Comment linking /robots-txt-analysis/
on “Analyzing One Million Robots.txt Files”Submitted Why Python needs to be paused during profiling – but Ruby doesn't always as a story · 86 points
HN discussionFor the venn code, I wrote up the approach here : http://www.benfrederickson.com/better-venn-diagrams/ Basically though, I'm using the non-linear CG method - so it doesn't require a positive definite matrix. The loss function is a little funky with handling the disjoint set/ subset relationships in the euler diagrams appropriately (defines the loss/gradient to be 0 if these constraints are satisfied), but this appro…
Comment linking /better-venn-diagrams/
on “Interactive Numerical Optimization Tutorial”Submitted Don't Pickle Your Data as a story · 59 points
HN discussionRegarding the similarity function used: I haven't studied it myself, but read this a long time ago: http://www.benfrederickson.com/distance-metrics/
Comment linking /distance-metrics/
on “Show HN: All-pair similarity search on millions of sets in Python and on laptop”Submitted Python, Catastrophic Regular Expressions and the GIL (2013) as a story · 54 points
HN discussionIt's unclear how important it is today, but historically analyses that used Github heavily favored Ruby: https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-language... .
Comment linking /ranking-programming-languages-by-github-users/
on “What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?”Submitted Why you can't dislike something on Facebook as a story · 49 points
HN discussiongood point! I actually used this technique recently, to speed up a numerical optimization for laying out venn diagrams: http://www.benfrederickson.com/better-venn-diagrams/ I didn't think of it when I was writing this post though =(
Comment linking /better-venn-diagrams/
on “Calculating the intersection area of 3 or more circles”Submitted Don't Pickle Your Data as a story · 36 points
HN discussionCheck out the Rust python bindings too; specifically PyO3. If you're starting from scratch it's worth exploring. [1] [1] https://www.benfrederickson.com/writing-python-extensions-in...
Comment linking /writing-python-extensions-in-rust-using-pyo3/
on “Cppyy – Automatic Python-C++ bindings”Submitted Unicode is Kind of Insane as a story · 32 points
HN discussionWas surprised to learn that it's used in ML models. I was under the impression that it's pretty slow[1]. Maybe it's used here because it's Python aware, and doesn't have trouble saving complex data structures? [1] https://www.benfrederickson.com/dont-pickle-your-data/
Comment linking /dont-pickle-your-data/
on “Exploiting machine learning Pickle files”Submitted All mainstream languages marketed as functional are losing market as a story · 21 points
HN discussion> I would think (or at least hope) that there are not many new projects being started in c++ these days. At least on Github it's growing : https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-language... I'm pretty sure that given the overall large increase in the amount of programmers, there are more new C++ projects being created this year than there were new software projects overall when c++98 was standardized. C…
Comment linking /ranking-programming-languages-by-github-users/
on “Breaking all the Eggs in C++ (2015)”Submitted Ranking Programming Languages by GitHub Users as a story · 15 points
HN discussion
