Top all-time · #1393
Benjamin Pollack
Personal blog · bitquabit.com/post · on HN as geckoprogrammingcareer
Benjamin Pollack writes bitquabit, a personal blog at bitquabit.com about programming and career. Since 2008, 50 different Hacker News readers have linked it 85 times, most often “The more things change (2015)”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 34 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link bitquabit for posts on version control, on comparing React and Flux to the Win32 WndProc model, and on Stack Overflow and Hacker News culture.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- Called "favourite rant", "neat article", "really good", "worth reading", and "kind of funny"; "made me laugh"; "more nuanced"; "good article".
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 34 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /post/the-more-things-change/7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-02-03
- The more things change (2015)6 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2016-04-30
- Zombie Operating Systems and ASP.NET MVC (2009)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-10-29
- Unorthodocs: Abandon Your DVCS and Return to Sanity3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-02-27
- Separate, support, serve3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-03-31
- Code Reviews and Bad Habits2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-02-20
- Cache me if you can2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-06-10
- Don't be a cargo-cult debugger2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-11
- I Do GitHub PRs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-09-10
- The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News (2009)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-04
What Hacker News says?
Given the various accidental leaks dues to people not realising deletion still has a history with git when publishing (not to mention git has no equivalent to mercurial's "censor" operation), or people confusing public and private repos on their github accounts, or even the story just last week here on HN with counterintuitive behaviour of forking in terms of privacy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41060102 )…
Comment linking /post/unorthodocs-abandon-your-dvcs-and-return-to-sanity/
on “"We ran out of columns"”Submitted Flux is the new WndProc as a story · 532 points
HN discussionMy favourite rant on this subject. https://www.bitquabit.com/post/unorthodocs-abandon-your-dvcs... Now svn does have things I miss from the Mercurial world.. grep --all, fa --deleted, revsets, phases.. some could be implemented serverside in svn, but svn dev lost a lot of momentum post-DVCS (git esp). But DVCS has issues that aren't an issue in svn land. History consistency, simple reliable narrow/shallow, people ca…
Comment linking /post/unorthodocs-abandon-your-dvcs-and-return-to-sanity/
on “Beej's Guide to Git”Submitted Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health as a story · 420 points
HN discussionI think my favourite fact(oid) to point out here would be that the React model is essentially the same thing as the good ol' Windows GUI model. The good ol' 1980s Windows, though perhaps slightly more convenient for developers. See [0]. I think it's good to keep that in mind as a reference point. -- https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/
Comment linking /post/the-more-things-change/
on “Software Disenchantment (2018)”Submitted Abandon your DVCS and return to sanity as a story · 331 points
HN discussionPetzold-style Win32 apps were already out of fashion on Windows 95. Apparently others with better knowledge of Web than me, think otherwise about React vs WndProc. https://bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/ As for your WebGL example, I would have used Swift with SceneKit instead, regarding productivity in native development on Apple systems.
Comment linking /post/the-more-things-change/
on “Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile”Submitted Coding is priority number five as a story · 152 points
HN discussionI've written about this before ( https://www.bitquabit.com/post/zombie-operating-systems-and-... ); we had to work around this on Kiln back in ~2010, because it meant that Unix users couldn't even access files named things like "aux.h" that were stored in their Mercurial repositories. That said, I had an error in that original post which this weirdly replicates: CP/M doesn't actually have quite this same error, beca…
Comment linking /post/zombie-operating-systems-and-aspnet-mvc/
on “An error message, still found in Windows 10, is a mistake from 1974”Submitted Enslaving your interns for evil and profit as a story · 151 points
HN discussionReact is not a new concept, it is moving back to tried and true basics, honestly it's one of the few JS frameworks that has been built by people that learned from past mistakes, from former implementations: https://bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/
Comment linking /post/the-more-things-change/
on “Why we chose Vue.js”Submitted Seriously? as a story · 124 points
HN discussionMercurial has largefiles and locking too: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/LargefilesExtension http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/LockExtension Like other people have noticed, you can have the good parts of a DVCS and the good parts of a CVCS. It doesn't have to be either-or: https://blogs.janestreet.com/centralizing-distributed-versio... http://bitquabit.com/post/unorthodocs-abandon-your-dvcs-and-...
Comment linking /post/unorthodocs-abandon-your-dvcs-and-return-to-sanity/
on “Announcing Git Large File Storage”Submitted Abandon Your DVCS and Return to Sanity (2015) as a story · 96 points
HN discussionI think you're referring to https://bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/ , which compares React to a Win32 WndProc function.
Comment linking /post/the-more-things-change/
on “You probably don't need a JavaScript framework”Submitted The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News (2009) as a story · 85 points
HN discussionNot so much. https://bitquabit.com/post/separate-support-serve/
Comment linking /post/separate-support-serve/
on “Bash on Ubuntu on Windows”Submitted Zombie Operating Systems and ASP.NET MVC (2009) as a story · 78 points
HN discussionThere is a big upset coming in the UX world as we converge toward a generalized implementation of the "diff & patch" pattern which underlies Git, React, compiler optimization, scene rendering, and query optimization. Don't forget Windows 1.0 in that list: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/
Comment linking /post/the-more-things-change/
on “Moxie: Incremental Declarative UI in Rust”Submitted Make Love, Not Flamewars as a story · 64 points
HN discussionAnd most of that came from Flux to begin with (as seen in https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2014/07/30/flux-action... ). There's also a lot of interesting parallels with the Win32 WndProc functions, as discussed in https://bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/ and https://bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/ . That said, you are absolutely encouraged to abstract over that process as much as you want!…
Comment linking /post/the-more-things-change/
on “Build Yourself a Redux”Submitted Unorthodocs: Abandon Your DVCS and Return to Sanity as a story · 58 points
HN discussionYou mean that they should wrap native controls? It's not React Native's model, it has been around since forever. WxWidgets ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WxWidgets ) 1992 SWT ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Widget_Toolkit ) 2003 Or if you mean React itself, I found this blog post kind of funny: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/ :-)
Comment linking /post/the-more-things-change/
on “Rust 2021: GUI”Submitted Code Reviews and Bad Habits as a story · 53 points
HN discussionThis is actually a not entirely invalid description! There was a neat article a few years back that specifically compared Flux to a Win32 WndProc function: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/ Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10381015
Comment linking /post/the-more-things-change/
on “React as a UI Runtime”Submitted The more things change (2015) as a story · 41 points
HN discussionAs completely off topic as my response will be, I'll at least keep to the theme of this thread. I was reminded the other day of an article that called out React and Flux for reinventing the Windows 1.0 dispatch architecture, and it made me laugh: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/ Also, can't miss the opportunity to bring up Graydon's iconic 2010 talk "Technology from the past come to save the fu…
Comment linking /post/the-more-things-change/
on “A comparison of Rust’s borrow checker to the one in C#”Submitted Why I hate Slack and you should too as a story · 38 points
HN discussionReally good one in response to claims that stack overflow could be rewritten in a weekend: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-n...
Comment linking /post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/
on ““I Could Rewrite Curl””Submitted Cache me if you can as a story · 33 points
HN discussion
