Top all-time · #1036
David R. MacIver
Personal blog · drmaciver.comprogrammingmathwriting
David R. MacIver's personal blog at drmaciver.com covers programming, math and writing. Since 2008, 67 different Hacker News readers have linked it 105 times, most often “It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-04-08
- How to read a mathematics textbook3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-05-30
- Situated Software (2018)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-12-17
- Why you should use a single repository for all your company’s projects2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-10-30
- Reading code by asking questions (2014)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-01-23
- Write libraries, not services2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-03-22
- Notes on Test-Case Reduction2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-08
- My favourite language feature2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-11-13
- Static typing will not save us from broken software2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-23
- A language wish list2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-07-14
What Hacker News says?
did you just describe the OP as a non-engineer? https://www.drmaciver.com/
Comment linking /
on “How to do hard things”Submitted How to do hard things as a story · 1189 points
HN discussionhttps://drmaciver.com/2022/05/learning-to-walk-through-walls... Citing Terry Pratchett’s “Interesting Times”.
Comment linking /2022/05/learning-to-walk-through-walls/
on “eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business”Submitted It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015) as a story · 650 points
HN discussionThe author posted a follow-up piece: https://www.drmaciver.com/2015/04/surprise-feminism/
Comment linking /2015/04/surprise-feminism/
on “It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)”Submitted How to read a mathematics textbook (2016) as a story · 226 points
HN discussionDRMaciver wrote a novella about it. Programmer at large , it's called. Largely about cultural variation in gender and sex norms. https://www.drmaciver.com/category/programmer-at-large/ (down) https://archiveofourown.org/works/9233966/chapters/20941043
Comment linking /category/programmer-at-large/
on “Ask HN: What's the best source code you've read?”Submitted Some things that might help you make better software (2016) as a story · 170 points
HN discussionThis confirms my own experience. I discovered that programs written in (or use) dynamic languages like Lisp are surprisingly reliable (Emacs in particular). Type safety won't protect us from broken software. Quote: "The most common bugs caught by static typing are also the least critical sort of bug." Source: http://www.drmaciver.com/2016/10/static-typing-will-not-save... Static typing helps a lot to catch basic typ…
Comment linking /2016/10/static-typing-will-not-save-us-from-broken-software/
on “Rasa: Extremely modular text editor built in Haskell”Submitted A “perfect” voting system as a story · 158 points
HN discussionPeople say this, but it seems like a false dichotomy. I use Emacs exactly because I choose productivity! Emacs might take more time to configure, but that's time measured in hours or, at most, days—a tiny blip compared to the total amount of time you spend programming in the environment! On the other hand, you get a system that you can quickly adapt to your specific needs in a way that other editors do not really su…
Comment linking /2018/11/situated-software/
on “Zero to Emacs and Org-roam: a step-by-step guide on Windows 10”Submitted The economics of software correctness as a story · 113 points
HN discussionI sketched a process for how this could work in a blog comment: http://www.drmaciver.com/2011/04/a-perfect-voting-system/com...
Comment linking /2011/04/a-perfect-voting-system/comment-page-1/
on “A “perfect” voting system”Submitted How to quickly become effective when joining a new company as a story · 94 points
HN discussionI came across this interesting post touching on Haskell just recently: https://www.drmaciver.com/2015/04/on-haskell-ruby-and-cards-...
Comment linking /2015/04/on-haskell-ruby-and-cards-against-humanity/
on “Why Co–Star Uses Haskell”Submitted Rigging elections with integer linear programming as a story · 91 points
HN discussionThis article feels like a follow up on "On Ruby"[1] and related to "It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty"[2]. The common theme I find in all three is the quality and health of a dependency. I agree with OP that stars and latest commit are not clear indicators of quality. I think more useful indicators are tests, documentations and pull requests. * Tests. These are things you can actually run to se…
Comment linking /2015/04/its-ok-for-your-open-source-library-to-be-a-bit-shitty/
on “On software popularity”Submitted A Manifesto For Error Reporting as a story · 72 points
HN discussionTo those who are attacking this article. I think, Steve unfortunately has chosen a somewhat bad example to illustrate a very good point. I have seen countless examples of complex payment logic shoved down into User model (or CreditCard model), because developer did not had the foresight to see that Payment logic does not belong in User or in CreditCard model. About functional or using higher order functions - yeah g…
Comment linking /2008/08/functional-code-not-equal-good-code/
on “The Secret To Rails OO Design”Submitted Some of my problems with correctness research as a story · 70 points
HN discussionFrom https://drmaciver.com/2020/06/you-should-complain-about-it/ : """I worked at Google. Google has an internal philosophy of “Don’t complain, fix things”. This is, on the face of it, a proactive and positive philosophy that empowers people to make changes in the workplace. It’s not. It’s a horrible, coercive, tool of abuse that is a fairly central part of why it only took me six months at Google before I burned ou…
Comment linking /2020/06/you-should-complain-about-it/
on “Hatching (Heraldry)”Submitted A parable about problem solving in software development (2013) as a story · 64 points
HN discussionYes. I know it's existing as coverage when you run unit-tests. I'm well aware of the performance impact on production, I guess it's the major challenge here. Since I'm mainly developing in python - here's a good article about that, he gave some directions to make it faster: https://www.drmaciver.com/2017/09/python-coverage-could-be-f...
Comment linking /2017/09/python-coverage-could-be-fast/
on “Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?”Submitted Static typing will not save us from broken software as a story · 63 points
HN discussionHave you seen the talk I did about using it with Django? http://www.drmaciver.com/2015/06/hypothesis-for-django/ We're all still figuring out the details, but this sort of testing definitely works for testing your applications as well as your algorithms. ETA: Oh, and thanks for the kind words. :-)
Comment linking /2015/06/hypothesis-for-django/
on “A new approach to property based testing”Submitted On Haskell, Ruby, and Cards Against Humanity as a story · 61 points
HN discussionI also like David MacIver’s more general notion of “situated software” https://www.drmaciver.com/2018/11/situated-software/ though its meaning is not as immediately obvious as “symbiosisware”.
Comment linking /2018/11/situated-software/
on “Symbiosisware”Submitted A parable about problem solving in software development as a story · 55 points
HN discussionSubmitted It might be worth learning an ML-family language as a story · 53 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exceptions for control flow considered perfectly acceptable as a story · 51 points
HN discussion
