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davidcel.is
Personal blog · davidcel.isprogrammingwriting
davidcel.is is a personal blog at davidcel.is about programming and writing. Since 2013, 24 different Hacker News readers have linked it 28 times, most often “Rails Needs New Governance”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Posts arguing against validating email addresses with regexes, critiquing DHH and Rails governance, and a Ruby collaborative-filtering recommender. Commenters cite them in debates on these topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Lukewarm takes from an amateur pizzaiolo and software engineer.
Most-linked posts?
- Rails Needs New Governance9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2025-09-19
- Stop Validating Email Addresses with Regex (2012)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-10-11
- /blog/2012/09/06/stop-validating-email-addresses-with-regex/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-05-17
- /articles/the-dhh-problem2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-10-21
What Hacker News says?
DHH is a controversial figure who increasingly comes out as tone deaf and perpetuating reactionary myths. It's not new either. https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2023/11/30/why-were-drop...
Comment linking /articles/rails-needs-new-governance
on “Steam Machine”Submitted From 1.5 GB to 50 MB: The Story of my Redis Database as a story · 204 points
HN discussionWish I could say the same :\. The top result for "David Celis" is a LinkedIn directory of people with my name. The first result that's actually me is my Twitter account, at number 3. My actual homepage, http://davidcel.is/ , doesn't even appear on the first page. Guess I need to become more important?
Comment linking /
on “The next version of DuckDuckGo”Submitted Stop Validating Email Addresses with Regex (2012) as a story · 179 points
HN discussionNot my argument, linked from the posted article: https://davidcel.is/articles/the-dhh-problem
Comment linking /articles/the-dhh-problem
on “I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories”Submitted Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex as a story · 155 points
HN discussionFascism may be the wrong label. Racism could be a much better fit. The blog post in question: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 The interpretation that raises some pretty interesting points about the inherent racism in the expressed worldview: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug... There is, however, an interpretation that explains how this specific kind of racism can b…
Comment linking /articles/rails-needs-new-governance
on “Gem.coop”Submitted Rails Needs New Governance as a story · 56 points
HN discussion> 1: https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance (this article has a lot of examples from DHH's blog) Basically just a blog post from some guy aghast that DHH has different political opinions to him. I'm politically on the left too but I can't imagine getting so incensed about someone else having right-leaning views. Do these people never leave the house to meet anyone outside their echo chamber? The min…
Comment linking /articles/rails-needs-new-governance
on “Gem.coop”Submitted Distance Constraints with PostgreSQL and PostGIS as a story · 4 points
HN discussionJust some background: there is a controversy in the Ruby community[0][2] around the governance of the rubygems project. It has been maintained for a long time by employees of Ruby Central but not in a corporate capacity. There was a recent hostile takeover of this project by the Ruby Central corporate arm. The most likely reason it was flagged from my perspective is that David Heinemeier Hansson (who created rails)…
Comment linking /articles/rails-needs-new-governance
on “Gem.coop”Submitted Writing Code Is Fun as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI prefer /@/ https://davidcel.is/posts/stop-validating-email-addresses-wi...
Comment linking /posts/stop-validating-email-addresses-with-regex/
on “SQL Keys in Depth”Submitted A Simple Rack Console as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt looked good at the beginning, but then I found out about its creator - DHH. Not someone I want to support. There are better distros out there (Omarchy isn't a distro btw). Just a few issues highlighted here: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug... https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance https://paulbjensen.co.uk/2025/09/17/on-dhhs-as-i-remember-l...
Comment linking /articles/rails-needs-new-governance
on “Emacs is my new window manager (2015)”Submitted Don't fall into the anti-AI hype – <antirez> as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Because we all have to get along regardless of what you believe False. Freedom of association is a human right. And nobody is obligated to donate their money to a cause or organization they do not support. Refusing to associate with someone who would like to "Make Britain White Again" (among many other things) is a completely reasonable stance. https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro... https:…
Comment linking /articles/rails-needs-new-governance
on “Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco”Good stuff, and a nice writeup/explanation! To impudently hijack the thread: for a very similar approach (jaccard similarity coefficient, ruby) which has a nice abstracted implementation for background workers, take a look at David Celis 'recommendable' - here's him introducing the same system: http://davidcel.is/blog/2012/02/07/collaborative-filtering-w... and the gem itself: http://davidcel.is/recommendable/ I bel…
Comment linking /recommendable/
on “Simple recommendation system written in Ruby”https://davidcel.is/posts/stop-validating-email-addresses-wi... Apropos to OP, this article also quotes JWZ.
Comment linking /posts/stop-validating-email-addresses-with-regex/
on “Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (2006)”I suspect it's because DHH is on the board of Shopify [1] and a lot of people really don't like him [2]. (To be clear, I am not stating my own opinion of DHH or Shopify. I'm just saying I suspect this is why a lot of Rubyists are not OK with RubyCentral being under the thumb of Shopify.) [1]: https://www.shopify.com/news/david-heinemeier-hansson-board [2]: https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance
Comment linking /articles/rails-needs-new-governance
on “Our stewardship: Where we are, what's changing and how we'll engage”> From validating email addresses Guys, no. Send an email. https://davidcel.is/posts/stop-validating-email-addresses-wi...
Comment linking /posts/stop-validating-email-addresses-with-regex/
on “You Should Learn Regex”White nationalism: I highly recommend reading these posts by people in the Rails community: https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro... These are some examples from the source: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
Comment linking /articles/rails-needs-new-governance
on “Omarchy: 1Password and 37signals become Distinguished Corporate Patrons”Alternatively, don't validate email addresses with a regex because it's pointless. Check that at least an '@' symbol is present and just send a damn email already[0]. Or better, don't send a damn email at all and let them access it because it's pointless to have an extra verification step. If you really want to do some clientside validation, just keep a basic regex and warn the user if the address doesn't seem right…
Comment linking /blog/2012/09/06/stop-validating-email-addresses-with-regex/
on “Email Regex that works 99.99%”Stop the email validation madness. http://davidcel.is/blog/2012/09/06/stop-validating-email-add... Fix this, and I'll try it out. I tried: myname+tesla.im@gmail.com I got: 'Enter a valid email' edit: can I get some commentary to season the down-voting?
Comment linking /blog/2012/09/06/stop-validating-email-addresses-with-regex/
on “Instant Messaging for Teams”One of the problems with highly judgemental writing is it does become a bit challenging to pick out what the argument is. I think there are probably some good points in here but I'm too distracted by the style to focus on them. > "I'm not here to remind you that DHH is a shameless fascist" While fascist is a vague word I don't think he's using it properly; and it means that all the other times he asserts something i…
Comment linking /articles/the-dhh-problem
on “Be a Loser”It validates emails with a regex. I'm not sure how many times it's been discussed that you shouldn't validate emails with a regex, but please stop validating emails with a regex. Source: https://github.com/guillaumepotier/validator.js/blob/master/... http://davidcel.is/blog/2012/09/06/stop-validating-email-add... http://stackoverflow.com/a/202528/744180 (others, just Google)
Comment linking /blog/2012/09/06/stop-validating-email-addresses-with-regex/
on “Validator.js: the almost missing javascript validator for Node and the browser”I disagree about extensive validating of email addresses. This is why: https://davidcel.is/articles/stop-validating-email-addresses...
Comment linking /articles/stop-validating-email-addresses-with-regex/
on “Applying SRE Principles to CI/CD”
