Top all-time · #8603
Codaholic
Personal blog · sriku.org/blog · on HN as srikuprogrammingscience
Codaholic is a personal blog at sriku.org about programming and science. Since 2012, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “J-expressions (2012)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link sriku.org's posts on J-expressions, a JSON-style way of writing DSLs in JavaScript. Commenters discuss it for narrative scripting and for message-bus formats that work across languages.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- J-expressions (2012)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-10-01
- Prolog Is Magic (2019)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-26
- Creating DSLs in JavaScript using J-expressions (2012)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-10-01
- Talk: Functional Thinking for Fun and Profit2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-01-18
What Hacker News says?
A while ago, I implemented a signin approach that looks similar to this "send a link/code" mode but (I believe) can't be exploited this way - https://sriku.org/blog/2017/04/29/forget-password/ - appreciate any thoughts on that. Btw this predates passkeys which should perhaps be the way to go from now on.
Comment linking /blog/2017/04/29/forget-password/
on “Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords”Submitted Bye Bye JavaScript Promises as a story · 144 points
HN discussionI currently use an email based signin for a site I maintain, which doesn't require a password. (Scheme described here - http://sriku.org/blog/2017/04/29/forget-password/ ) I don't think I understand the full consequences of reducing the steps for this even more, but am very curious to consider. I do need to maintain a sense of continued identity across machines and need to communicate with the users outside of the s…
Comment linking /blog/2017/04/29/forget-password/
on “How Discord Won”Submitted J-expressions (2012) as a story · 36 points
HN discussionIt is one way to go "passwordless" .. though you're piggy backing on the security that your email system already has. Shameless plug of old post that describes how to restrict login to only the initiator even if login is initiated via an email link - http://sriku.org/blog/2017/04/29/forget-password/
Comment linking /blog/2017/04/29/forget-password/
on “Password expiration is dead, long live passwords”Submitted Prolog Is Magic (2019) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion(shameless plug) In Feb 2020, during the first Clojure meetup organized in Chennai, I gave a talk titled "I'm LisP, I'm inevitable" in which I spoke about the journey towards lisp/scheme in muvee's flagship automatic video editing product. http://sriku.org/posts/inevitable-lisp/ It may be helpful to some to understand the recurrent pattern here so they can detect it early when it happens to them.
Comment linking /posts/inevitable-lisp/
on “An Intuition for Lisp Syntax”Submitted Talk: Functional Thinking for Fun and Profit as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe note about DRY didn't sound like a mandate to ignore it entirely and "duplicate freely". As you said, duplication is a way to ratify that a common pattern exists first before putting something in place that captures the pattern. Many young programmers try to anticipate these concepts and end up with some form of over-design. The goal of DRY is not so much to avoid duplication, but to figure out useful concepts i…
Comment linking /blog/2016/02/06/beta-abstraction-for-bottom-up-theory-building/
on “How I Became a Better Programmer”Submitted Creating DSLs in JavaScript using J-expressions (2012) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOn a total tangent, I've never been satisfied with the analogy of "garbage collection" for what memory managers do ... and tried to come up with something better [1]. Not surprisingly, it came up when I was actually washing dishes :) [1] http://sriku.org/blog/2014/07/06/dish-washing-versus-garbage...
Comment linking /blog/2014/07/06/dish-washing-versus-garbage-collection/
on “Visualizing Garbage Collection Algorithms”Submitted Alain Aspect Nobel as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI don't trust myself enough to manage passwords properly for some small services I run 'cos I simply don't have the spare time to invest compared to investing in functionality. For that reason I've been trying out a password-less login for a while now (works via email) and so far non tech folks haven't complained too. It is pretty much as though you always used the "forgot password" mechanism to login. Wrote about i…
Comment linking /blog/2017/04/29/forget-password/
on “Hacker, Hack Thyself”Submitted Errors, Recovery and Async Code Flow (Javascript) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt is common for lisp folks to chime in at this point to iterate the value of s-expressions. While this is one such, but I actually have an evolution story about this which I shared in a talk here - http://sriku.org/posts/inevitable-lisp/
Comment linking /posts/inevitable-lisp/
on “Intercal, YAML, and Other Horrible Programming Languages”Submitted Pure HTML business model canvas template as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is cool and I have my own take on it after being nerd sniped by XKCD - https://sriku.org/posts/nerdsniped/ - I link to this article at the end but that post specifically solves the xkcd puzzle.
Comment linking /posts/nerdsniped/
on “Infinite Grid of Resistors”This is why I avoid using "this". Placing this comment next to any of the 9 points causes the comment to mean something different. However, "this" could be useful in circumstances where that is the exact effect desired. Even in such cases, the relevant object can be made explicit as an argument. Some time back, I had to explain to some people how to think about "traditional OO" in JS, which I tried to make systemati…
Comment linking /blog/2012/04/12/classes-and-javascript/
on “JavaScript: Clarifying The Keyword ‘this’”Correct. Reverse mode seems much harder to express in Haskell..i was trying to understand AD some time ago and used Haskell for that (before running into Conal's paper). This way of writing forward AD was easy and it was awesome to see type inference and laziness help me with the understanding. At that time, I tried to code up reverse mode AD and failed to do it with comparable simplicity. If I may ... 1. First atte…
Comment linking /blog/2019/03/13/automatic-differentiation-higher-ranked-beings/
on “Automatic Differentiation in 38 lines of Haskell”This stuff is close-to-heart for me as FRP (and Elliott's work in general) greatly inspired my thinking over the years. Here are a few instances where the drive to be denotational in api design led to very satisfactory results. This is a massive "shameless plug" post, but I justify it as a dedication to Conal Elliott. First, a couple of old talks on the topic - - "Functional thinking" - Brings together some of the t…
Comment linking /blog/2015/12/13/towards-reactive-animation-in-elm/
on “The Misunderstood Roots of FRP”I've been frustrated by the magnified expectations of kids w.r.t. programming because they play sophisticated games compared to the pong/bricks/tetris of my highschool days. Very hard to satisfy my kids with doing, say, turtle graphics. I'm yet to try Minecraft programming (need windows machine) but that might do it for them as they're into Minecraft. I had a blip of a realization one day when idly talking to the 6y…
Comment linking /blog/2019/07/16/prolog-is-magic/
on “Teaching our five year old to code by cheating”Ah, but I'm thinking real Javascript, J-expression[1] style. Something like this: [ `I stared at Monsieur Fogg.`, { if: `know_about_wager`, then: [`<> "But surely you are not serious?" I demanded.`], else: [`<> "But there must be a reason for this trip," I observed.`] }, `He said nothing in reply, merely considering his newspaper with as much thoroughness as entomologist considering his latest pinned addition.` ] Or…
Comment linking /blog/2012/04/15/j-expressions/
on “Ink – inkle's narrative scripting language”I use a similar technique to this author's on my site (for about 5 years now) but it is a variant where even if someone got the email or you forward it accidentally to someone, they won't be able to use it to login. Technique described here - http://sriku.org/blog/2017/04/29/forget-password/ ... basically when use provides email to signin, a cookie stores a part of the token while the server send the other part via…
Comment linking /blog/2017/04/29/forget-password/
on “Simple passwordless authentication for web projects”<shameless plug> I mention some basic ones in my old talk on "functional thinking" - http://sriku.org/blog/2015/08/11/talk-functional-thinking-fo... . I find the Haskell(/ML) notation for types and functions quite a leap in thinking about systems.
Comment linking /blog/2015/08/11/talk-functional-thinking-for-fun-and-profit/
on “Notational Intelligence”I'm generally of the opinion that games are a lesser evil than TV so I'm slightly happier when the kids turn on the Xbox instead of open the flix. However, if there is a gap of a few days, the downloads start ... And we cant play without the updates. A simple solution could be let people play the version they already have while the update is in progress. But no, the services have to be on the internet and their econ…
Comment linking /blog/2019/07/16/prolog-is-magic/
on “Old Man Yells at Cloud: Technology has gotten objectively worse”Good categorization. However, the example of sound -> text uses a set of expected invariants for the problem. Invariants abound in sensory data related problems as they are inherently high dimensional as measured but our interest lies in a vastly reduced space. You could squint and look at these examples as PBT as well. Such powerful invariants have been hard (caveat: for me, personally, not done research) in genera…
Comment linking /blog/2019/03/07/talk-machine-learning-as-extreme-tdd/
on “Metamorphic Testing”getting a 404 on the linked article about dsl's and linked expressions. Edit: I believe this is the proper link: http://sriku.org/blog/2012/04/14/creating-dsls-in-javascript... Definitely interesting though - json as a DSL with implementation in many languages could be useful for lots of message bus applications.
Comment linking /blog/2012/04/14/creating-dsls-in-javascript-using-j-expressions/
on “J-expressions (2012)”"suddenly"? Yes it has become popular overnight in 30+ years. I'd chalk it up to two aspects - strongly typed languages that show how to do safe composition at scale, and .... Compositionality at scale.. One example, lambda calculus in which functions are the only "thing" shows that all "abstractions" can be understood as "beta abstraction" ... Which is formally defined. Other paradigms (like OOP) don't provide such…
Comment linking /blog/2016/02/06/beta-abstraction-for-bottom-up-theory-building/
on “Why has functional programming become so popular in non-academic settings?”This - I even ran Claude to produce a security eval of openclaw for fun and it was mostly spot on - https://sriku.org/files/openclaw-secreport-claude-13feb2026....
Comment linking /files/openclaw-secreport-claude-13feb2026.pdf
on “I Don't Like Magic”