Top all-time · #2736
Dennis Forbes
Personal blog · dennisforbes.caprogrammingai
Dennis Forbes's personal blog at dennisforbes.ca covers programming and ai. Since 2013, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 99 times, most often “Effortlessly Support Next Gen Image Formats or a Picture Is Worth a Better Image”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dennis Forbes's blog for explanations of floating point and serving Go behind nginx, and for posts on JPEG XL, MongoDB and SQL query plans, often as cross-references.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Thoughts and musings of Dennis Forbes, expert software developer/architect and AI engineer
Most-linked posts?
- Effortlessly Support Next Gen Image Formats or a Picture Is Worth a Better Image3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-06-08
- Guy whose suicide note was posted on HN appears to be OK3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-02-03
- Mindful Software Development2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-03-20
- My Data-Backed Battle and Defeat of Hypertension2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-10-29
- Why You Should Use Reverse Proxies2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-19
- Help: Suicide note on blog2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-01-26
- Selling Solutions: The Ugly Side of Consulting2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-05-22
- Understanding Floating-Point Numbers (2020)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-28
- The Most Powerful Feature of Go Is The Least Sexy2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-07-25
- LVM Snapshots for Temporal Databases2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-12-12
What Hacker News says?
I'm now in complete control of someone else’s commercial business hvac account because of precisely this problem. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the dots. Indeed, almost every comment about this has nothing to do with the dots, including the submission. Someone entered the wrong email address, and in the process got yours. It isn't like the dotted or undotted one is legitimately theirs -- it can't possib…
Comment linking /index.php/2016/04/08/email-addresses-need-a-checksum/
on “The dots do matter: how to scam a Gmail user”Submitted Rust Faster Than C? Not So Fast… as a story · 94 points
HN discussion>Can you point out an example of data you would store in a document database, which is not purely for caching purposes? I've been a pretty vocal critic of document databases in the past[1] (indeed, I get a little bit of a chuckle recalling the prevailing HN wisdom a couple of years ago and comparing it to now), however I recently had a project where added data was immutable and additive and non-relational: MongoDB w…
Comment linking /index.php/2010/03/24/the-impact-of-ssds-on-database-performance-and-the-performance-paradox-of-data-explodification/
on “Why You Should Never Use MongoDB”Submitted Help: Suicide note on blog as a story · 94 points
HN discussionI can only draw from anecdotes, but those align with your suspicion: where overtime was mandatory (where management was largely about maximizing suffering ^1, as if suffering has any value by itself), everyone simply compensated by doing less real work per work hour. It does seem like many people have a fixed quantity of productive output, and the decision is simply about how much to spread it out. This isn't true f…
Comment linking /index.php/2013/03/05/mediocre-managers-can-only-manage-suffering/
on “A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour”Submitted Go and Android as a story · 82 points
HN discussionhttps://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2017/04/11/floating-point-...
Comment linking /index.php/2017/04/11/floating-point-numbers-an-infinite-number-of-mathematicians-enter-a-bar/
on “Floating Point Visually Explained”Submitted Windows Is Already Dead, It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet as a story · 34 points
HN discussionIt's years old, but I listened to the advice of- https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2013/08/07/ten-reasons-you... -and in re-analysis it all holds completely true. Nginx gives my deploy flexibility, at essentially negligible cost. And no Go development should include a bunch of boilerplate code to do banal stuff like serving static content.
Comment linking /index.php/2013/08/07/ten-reasons-you-should-still-use-nginx/
on “So you want to expose Go on the Internet”Submitted Time to Dump Windows? as a story · 27 points
HN discussionThe best explanation on floats - https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/features/floating_point/underst...
Comment linking /blog/features/floating_point/understanding-floating-point-numbers/
on “Float Exposed”Submitted Demystifying Floating-Point Numbers as a story · 14 points
HN discussionUh... Go plays very well with C and C++. https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2013/07/23/the-most-powerf...
Comment linking /index.php/2013/07/23/the-most-powerful-feature-of-go-is-the-least-sexy/
on “Rust and Go”Submitted Guy whose suicide note was posted on HN appears to be OK as a story · 13 points
HN discussionI do think it is a bit disingenuous that the author compares this to a classic web application and its data needs, when the needs here are so trivial. It is very well designed for what it does (the security needs of such a checker almost dictates the design), but is a model usable by very few applications. As an aside, the article talks a bit about Brotli and it's worth noting that Brotli is nothing more than LZ77 w…
Comment linking /index.php/2016/01/28/eat-your-brotli-revisiting-why-you-should-use-nginx-in-your-solutions/
on “Why Searching Through 500M Pwned Passwords Is So Quick”Submitted Money Really Does Matter – I’m an Admitted Code Mercenary as a story · 12 points
HN discussionLocation: Toronto (well, Burlington) Remote: Only Technologies: Full stack, C#, C++, Swift, most web techs. CV: https://dennisforbes.ca/articles/about.html Email: dforbes@yafla.com I have my own products (iOS apps and a SAAS play) and only work on other people's stuff part-time time to maintain diversity and sharpness in my universe of technology, and importantly to keep engaged with other people when otherwise I co…
Comment linking /articles/about.html
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2020)”Submitted Shlemiel the Painter Is Back: How Zig's Libc Rewrite Made SQLite 12,000× Slower as a story · 11 points
HN discussionA migrant is simply someone who moves from one place to another, in this context from one country to another. The legality of said move is irrelevant, and they are additional people that need housing and services. The number of people who have moved to Canada, through an unending series of special programs and exemptions and visa waivers and programs is colossal. But if we must talk about illegals, yes Canada has an…
Comment linking /articles/10000_brainiacs.html
on “Why Canada Should Join the EU”Submitted The Most Powerful Feature of Go Is The Least Sexy as a story · 11 points
HN discussionIt's worth noting that SQL Server, presuming you've configured uniques and relationships correctly, actually runs exactly the same query plan for their first query and their last query. I detailed this at http://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2014/01/24/your-query-plann...
Comment linking /index.php/2014/01/24/your-query-planner-and-you/
on “Use SQL subqueries to count distinct 50x faster”Submitted Understanding the Hiring Process / Anti-.NET Bigotry as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSeveral years ago I made a basic, interactive explanation of the same- https://dennisforbes.ca/articles/understanding-floating-poin... At the time it was to educate a group I was working with about why their concern that "every number in JavaScript is a double" doesn't mean that 1 is actually 1.000000001 (e.g. everyone knows that floating point numbers are potentially approximations, so there is a widespread belief…
Comment linking /articles/understanding-floating-point-numbers.html
on “Floating point visually explained (2017)”- tl · 2015-05-07
Submitted 100,000 Installs in the First Week. Give or Take 98,000. Mostly Take as a story · 7 points
HN discussion This impending-collapse of Hacker News thing has been a recurring theme for most of the existence of the site (while this account is only half-a-year old, I've had various accounts on here since the very early days). The only recent trend that has diminished this site is actually this very submission, and the related self-righteous comments that appear in virtually every story now (one single fresh account drops a n…
Comment linking /index.php/2013/06/02/hacker-news-isnt-a-support-group/
on “You can't impress developers”Submitted We Need an HTML “Lite” to Counter AMP as a story · 4 points
HN discussionLocation: Greater Toronto Area Remote: Absolutely Willing to Relocate: Yes Technologies: Databases, Swift, Android / Java, C++, Back-end systems, financial systems, web applications. Just love a challenge CV: See https://dennisforbes.ca/articles/about.html will provide more details on request. Email:dforbes@yafla.com
Comment linking /articles/about.html
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2019)”- tl · 2016-04-04
Submitted The Full Stack Developer as a story · 4 points
HN discussion Instead of using a new PNG standard, I'd still rather use JPEG XL just because it has progressive decoding. And you know, whilst looking like png, being as small as webp, supporting HDR and animations, and having even faster decoding speed. https://dennisforbes.ca/articles/jpegxl_just_won_the_image_w...
Comment linking /articles/jpegxl_just_won_the_image_wars.html
on “Consider using Zstandard and/or LZ4 instead of Deflate”Submitted Defending the Apple Neural Engine (ANE) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
