Top all-time · #3239
Derick Rethans
Personal blog · derickrethans.nlprogrammingweb
Derick Rethans's personal blog at derickrethans.nl covers programming and web. Since 2010, 24 different Hacker News readers have linked it 28 times, most often “15 years of Xdebug”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, 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 PHP developer's blog and talks for PHP internals and date/time material, including his timezone-quirks slides, and posts on garbage collection, DateTimeImmutable and the @ operator.
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.
Most-linked posts?
- 15 years of Xdebug2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-05-10
- Crowd-serfing (2013)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-04-16
- Storing Date/Times in Databases2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-03-31
What Hacker News says?
Not even the maintainers really understand what they are doing : https://github.com/g0tmi1k/debian-ssh > There was an #ifndef PURIFY there for a reason. It's because the openssl authors knew that line would cause trouble in a memory debuger like Purify or Valgrind. Where a debian maintainer screwed the RNG of OpenSSL to make valgrind happy. This made any key generated on a debian or ubuntu system from 2006 to 2008 v…
Comment linking /distributions-please-dont-cripple-php-or-red-hat-stop-fucking-around.html
on “Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL”Submitted Storing Date/Times in Databases as a story · 46 points
HN discussionI think the article on this, explains why a memory reduction by garbage collection also increases execution speed: http://derickrethans.nl/collecting-garbage-performance-consi...
Comment linking /collecting-garbage-performance-considerations.html
on “Composer – Disable GC when computing deps and refs”Submitted Managing schema changes with MongoDB as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI believe these obfuscators work by forcing you to install a binary-only .so zend extension in php.ini, which intercepts these encoded files. The files themselves should decode to already-halfway-parsed PHP opcodes or so, which is probably injected into the PHP/Zend virtual machine. Figuring out the encoding scheme is probably a lot of boring disassembly work, which in the end just lets you decode a bunch of PHP opc…
Comment linking /projects.html
on “How I Hacked Facebook’s Secure Files Transfer Service for Employees”Submitted PHP 8: A Quick Look at JIT – Derick Rethans as a story · 3 points
HN discussionEven if you're not using PHP I highly recommend reading Derick Rethans's slides on Date and Time. There's lots of good information there, especially about all the various quirks with timezones. http://derickrethans.nl/talks/time-zendcon9.pdf , you may even be able to find a video of him presenting this.
Comment linking /talks/time-zendcon9.pdf
on “Accepting the "I could do that in a weekend" challenge”Submitted 15 years of Xdebug as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYes! I remember downloading this for working in an offline setup 20+ years ago. Still, maybe getting rid of the mirrors program 5 years ago had its downsides: https://derickrethans.nl/php-mirrors.html
Comment linking /php-mirrors.html
on “Php.net Is Down”Submitted Mongo is dead, long live MongoClient as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSome discussion about this method at http://derickrethans.nl/immutable-datetime.html
Comment linking /immutable-datetime.html
on “PHP DateTimeImmutable::modify()”Submitted To GMT or not to GMT as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI spent 10-15 minutes poking around php internals newslist for an explanation of the php 5.4 changelog "improved performance of the (@) silence operator" without luck. It's just listed as a zend engine improvement without specifications. Someone posted here a clear example of why (in earlier php5) it generates far worse opcode: http://derickrethans.nl/five-reasons-why-the-shutop-operator...
Comment linking /five-reasons-why-the-shutop-operator-should-be-avoided.html
on “Improve PHP Disk I/O & remove Race conditions by using '@' error suppression”Submitted Leap seconds and what to do with them [2009] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fail Faster as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted References in PHP: An Indepth Look [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Good Introduction of OpenStreetMap for Web Developers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Xdebug 2.1 Released as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Storing Date/Times + TZ offset in Databases as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Humans in the LLM Loop as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted 15 years of Xdebug as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Crowd-serfing (2013) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted MongoDB and arbitrary key names as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Crowd-serfing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Where is the Sun? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Spatial Indexes: Fetching Data/SQLite as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Analysing Colours in an Image as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted 64-bit integers in MongoDB with PHP as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
