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dcreager.net
Personal blog · dcreager.netprogramming
dcreager.net is a personal blog at dcreager.net about programming. Since 2009, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “Another variable-length integer encoding (2021)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link dcreager.net posts on a variable-length integer encoding (a better varint), and on setting up comments in a Jekyll blog with Disqus. Commenters cite these as references in technical discussions.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /talks/2021-strange-loop/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-12-09
- Another variable-length integer encoding (2021)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-08-11
- Incremental zero-config code navigation using stack graphs with Tree-sitter at G (2021)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-03-22
- Network Error Logging: Client-Side Monitoring of HTTP Requests2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-27
What Hacker News says?
We’ve been working on a framework called “stack graphs” that lets us extract exactly this kind of information without having to build anything. More details in my Strange Loop talk from October: https://dcreager.net/talks/2021-strange-loop/ Stay tuned for more!
Comment linking /talks/2021-strange-loop/
on “Improving GitHub Code Search”Submitted Another variable-length integer encoding (2021) as a story · 62 points
HN discussionWe've looked at LSIF before, and decided against it for a few reasons, mostly around COGS, operational overhead, and indexing latency. I gave a talk at last year's FOSDEM [1] going into some of the details. (Caveat that that talk was from when we were using a different open-source library, Semantic, to power fuzzy Code Nav. It's much easier to support new languages using the now-current tree-sitter query approach!)…
Comment linking /talks/2020-fosdem/
on “Tree-sitter: an incremental parsing system for programming tools”Submitted Closing word at Zürich Colloquium (1968) as a story · 60 points
HN discussionHi there! I manage the GitHub team responsible for the Code Nav part of this. Re 30-80% coverage, can you elaborate on the biggest missing piece for you? Is it the number of languages that are covered, or too many false positives in the results we show? (Or something else?) For the latter, it's a known limitation in that we're only doing "fuzzy" or "c-tags-like" Code Nav — defs and refs are only matched by their tex…
Comment linking /talks/2020-fosdem/
on “An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools”Submitted A combinator-based parsing library for C as a story · 23 points
HN discussion> if you have some interesting links to share I'll skim them with pleasure. I do not advise skimming. I've been a full-time tech journalist for 2 & a half years now (I was in the 1990s as well but the 21st century is very different) and I find the majority of readers who angrily disagree with my articles did not in fact understand the article because they tried to skim it and they didn't get the gist. (In a previous…
Comment linking /remarkable/Franz2000.pdf
on “In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)”Submitted Network Error Logging: Client-Side Monitoring of HTTP Requests as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI talk a bit in my FOSDEM talk from last year how the “local editor” and “hosted service” versions of code navigation have enough real differences that it's not obviously best to reuse local editor solutions in a hosted service like GitHub: https://dcreager.net/talks/2020-fosdem/
Comment linking /talks/2020-fosdem/
on “Stack Graphs”Submitted Buzzy: Dependency Management for C as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI go into some amount of detail in a talk I gave at last year's FOSDEM: https://dcreager.net/talks/2020-fosdem/ For LSP, the short version is that running separate sidecar services in production for every language that we want to support is a complete non-starter. That would completely eat up my team's time budget handling operational duties. LSIF is a great technology that lets you run LSP servers in a “batch” mode…
Comment linking /talks/2020-fosdem/
on “Stack Graphs”Submitted Clean Git histories and code review workflows as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOP author here. I also gave a talk about this at Strange Loop back in October if folks want to watch/listen instead of read: https://dcreager.net/talks/2021-strange-loop/
Comment linking /talks/2021-strange-loop/
on “Stack Graphs”Submitted Shared library versions as a story · 3 points
HN discussionStepping away from Forth in particular, one of the benefits of a stack-based / concatenative language is that it's easy to implement on constrained hardware. uxn [1] is a great example of that. And shameless self-promotion, if you're interested in how these kinds of languages compare with more traditional named-based languages, with more theoretical constructs like the lambda calculus and combinatory logic, and with…
Comment linking /talks/concatenative-languages/
on “Forth: The programming language that writes itself”Submitted Slip and slurp in a linear CPS concatenative language as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is exactly right. You either end up with something very low-level (on the level of LLVM IR, for instance)—which means you aren't constructing and analyzing high-level language constructs anymore—or with something high-level but with many language-specific special cases grafted on. Where we've found success is in stepping back and creating formalisms that are language-agnostic to begin with, and then using tree-…
Comment linking /talks/stack-graphs/
on “Let's create a Tree-sitter grammar”Submitted Stack graphs: Name resolution at scale [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNote that this article describes our implementation of “search-based” or “ctags-like” Code Navigation, which definitely has the imprecision that you describe. We've also been working over the previous ~year on a framework called Stack Graphs [1,2,3], which lets us tackle “precise” Code Navigation while still having the zero-config and incremental aspects that are described in the paper. The build-based approach that…
Comment linking /talks/2021-strange-loop/
on “Static analysis at GitHub”Submitted Incremental zero-config code navigation using stack graphs with Tree-sitter at G (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionby process, you mean call stack or series of event handoffs? I think you're right that that's one of the key ways that devs (esp noobs to the codebase) need to navigate, and must be supported. I think 'stack graphs' are supposed to do that[1], but have never tried them. but there are other navigation modes we need to support as well -- like if you're deleting something, or upgrading something, 'find all references'.…
Comment linking /talks/2021-strange-loop/
on “Code colocation is king”Submitted NP-hard isn't the end of the world as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is very cool, well done! I love seeing people get interested in other programming paradigms, like concatenative languages. I gave a talk about them at Strange Loop / PWL last year: https://dcreager.net/talks/concatenative-languages/
Comment linking /talks/concatenative-languages/
on “Stem, a stack-based language with metaprogramming and a C FLI”Submitted Dcreager.net – Introducing Network Error Logging as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe Open Firmware bootloader also used a Forth as its command-line interface. That was used on PowerPC Macs before Apple switched over to Intel. (So, you know, two processor architectures ago.) A common theme is that Forth-likes are very easy to implement on constrained hardware. I have a Strange Loop talk a couple of years ago where I go into this at the end, calling out uxn from the Hundred Rabbits folks. You migh…
Comment linking /talks/concatenative-languages/
on “Why concatenative programming matters (2012)”Submitted “High-water mark” buffers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI researched many different varint encodings for a GraphQL-specific binary format (resulting in Argo: https://github.com/msolomon/argo ). I ended up choosing protobuf-style zig-zag varints, but I also found these interesting: vu128: https://john-millikin.com/vu128-efficient-variable-length-in... metric/imperial varint: https://dcreager.net/2021/03/a-better-varint/ vectorizing VByte: https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.07387
Comment linking /2021/03/a-better-varint/
on “Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding”yep, it's what I do (Jekyll + Disqus) and it's actually very easy. example and instructions from someone else's blog: http://dcreager.net/2009/08/07/disqus-comments/
Comment linking /2009/08/07/disqus-comments/
on “How To Not Get Your Blog Hacked”That isn't totally true, even on Linux we have had https://jmvdveer.home.xs4all.nl/en.algol-68-genie.html for years. Also, most languages trace back to ALGOL 60 (the C family tree goes ALGOL 60 -> BCPL -> CPL -> B -> new B -> C -> ANSI C -> ..., though there was some influence such as the idea of "casting", but apparently C only has a castrated version of what ALGOL 68 had) and Pascal is if anything negativly influe…
Comment linking /people/wirth/1968-closing-word/
on “ga68, the GNU Algol 68 Compiler – FOSDEM 2026 [video]”