Top all-time · #7534
Dave King
Personal blog · tildedave.com · on HN as tildedaveprogramming
Dave King's personal blog at tildedave.com covers programming. Since 2014, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-11, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this page, an excerpt from Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow about Byron the Bulb, the long-burning lightbulb and the Phoebus Cartel that conspired to shorten bulb life.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Hi there! I’m Dave, a software guy. I’m a long-time programmer - I learned to spell from Sierra’s King’s Quest, began writing text adventures in GWBASIC on...
Most-linked posts?
- /byron.html4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-02-06
- /2014/11/15/introduction-to-contexts-in-react-js.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-01-21
What Hacker News says?
Some fun reading on the topic of long-living light bulbs: https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html Edit: the source is not mentioned anywhere. This is an excerpt from Gravity's Rainbow.
Comment linking /byron.html
on “What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?”Submitted Suggesting Technical Improvements as a story · 32 points
HN discussionI've found that contexts are a good way to handle this - they're basically invisible props that get implicitly passed down the component tree, and mixins can whitelist which parts of the context they want to be able to use. They're undocumented, but they're used quite widely in React, so I doubt they're going anywhere. You can have a top-level component instantiate new dispatchers and stores and expose them as i.e.…
Comment linking /2014/11/15/introduction-to-contexts-in-react-js.html
on “Marty.js – A JavaScript library for state management in React applications”Submitted Mysql to cassandra migration story as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHere is the section in Gravity's Rainbow which tells the tale of Byron the Lightbulb (the longest-burning lightbulb) and his troubles with the Phoebus Cartel: https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html In a book full of strange meandering asides, this was among the most memorable.
Comment linking /byron.html
on “Phoebus Cartel”Submitted Application Failure Scenarios with Cassandra as a story · 2 points
HN discussionReact really doesn't give you any way to handle communication between components besides going downwards, which is fine because that solves a lot of problems. You can very easily implement his 'subscribe' scenario in React. In fact, in 0.14 they are planning on having observe[0] to help you do just this. Now, for my little plug. I've been working on Reapp since launch building a couple real-world apps and I agree th…
Comment linking /2014/11/15/introduction-to-contexts-in-react-js.html
on “Don't React”Submitted I Find Gulp.js Extremely Frustrating as a story · 1 points
HN discussionPynchon's "Byron the Bulb", the great example of American Sublime according to Harold Bloom, is a paranoid story about this very affair https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html
Comment linking /byron.html
on “Phoebus Cartel”I inevitably feel obligated to share “Byron the Bulb” from Gravity’s Rainbow https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html
Comment linking /byron.html
on “The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)”Obligatory on the topic of long-burning bulbs: https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html
Comment linking /byron.html
on “Livermore's centennial light, the world's longest-burning light bulb”
