Top all-time · #15375
Dirkjan Ochtman
Personal blog · dirkjan.ochtman.nl/writing · on HN as dochtmanprogrammingsystems
Dirkjan Ochtman's personal blog at dirkjan.ochtman.nl covers programming and systems. Since 2013, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Posts on Rust and Cargo dependency management, including the vgo proposal and dependency graphs of Servo and Go web frameworks. Commenters cite them for context rather than judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /files/servo-graph.svg3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-09-04
What Hacker News says?
I liked the Stanford course given by Aiken, on Coursera: https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/writing/2012/07/21/compilers-on-c... Also, if you like this sort of thing, my compiler in Python that compiles to LLVM IR might be interesting: https://github.com/djc/runa
Comment linking /writing/2012/07/21/compilers-on-coursera.html
on “An Intro to Compilers”Submitted Rust is a big tent as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSeconded. My experience: Taking this course was an great way to learn more about compilers and fill a hole in my CS curriculum. Professor Alex Aiken is a great instructor and covers a good amount of material. I learned a lot about compiler construction despite having toyed with my own compiler before starting the course. The programming assignments were particularly tough, giving me useful experience in building com…
Comment linking /writing/2012/07/21/compilers-on-coursera.html
on “Let’s Build a Compiler (1995)”Submitted Show HN: OxiSH, a modern, memory-safe SSH server as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI took Aiken's Stanford Compilers course on Coursera and wrote about it: https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/writing/2012/07/21/compilers-on-c...
Comment linking /writing/2012/07/21/compilers-on-coursera.html
on “Essentials of Programming Languages”Submitted Rust in 2018 – Dirkjan Ochtman as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSure that's possible. I saw Matt Mackall do it for Mercurial first: https://www.selenic.com/blog/?p=626 In rust, there's cargo-graph to do this for your packages: https://github.com/kbknapp/cargo-graph I used that on Servo once see PNG at https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/files/servo-graph.png or SVG at https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/files/servo-graph.svg . From these explorations, I think the four color theorem-type planarity…
Comment linking /files/servo-graph.svg
on “What the Four Color Theorem Can Teach Us About Writing Software”That's quite weird. When I run `rm Cargo.lock && cargo generate-lockfile` on the Servo repo (test performed on the cheapest VPS that money can buy) it exits near-instantly (after first spending three seconds trying to git-fetch new versions of the dozen custom dependencies that live on Github rather than crates.io). For reference, here's what Servo's dependency graph looked like two years ago (July 2016): https://di…
Comment linking /files/servo-graph.svg
on “The vgo proposal is accepted. Now what?”It is, indeed, also on Android. I use it there constantly, works great. Back in the Google Reader demise days, I tried pretty much everything that was available, and NewsBlur was clearly the best. I've happily paid for it ever since. The founder and his staff are responsive to issues on Twitter, too. As for what I read: - Blogs category: 116 "blogs", which is to say irregularly (sometimes very rarely) updated feeds…
Comment linking /files/NewsBlur-djc-2016-07-31.xml
on “Ask HN: What's on your RSS reader?”Yeah, that course is awesome. I also took it in order to properly learn about compilers for my language design/compiler side project. I wrote about the experience here: https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/writing/2012/07/21/compilers-on-c... Afterwards, I thoroughly overhauled my nascent compiler. It currently lives here: https://github.com/djc/runa/ (It's a Python-like systems language, with a compiler written in Python tar…
Comment linking /writing/2012/07/21/compilers-on-coursera.html
on “The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language”NewsBlur is the best of the web-based bunch I've been checking out recently, but it's still... not quite there. For example, this glitch has been around for weeks: http://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/files/newsblur-glitch.png I'm also not sure it's quite fast enough yet. I've used FeedDemon and Reeder (and NetNewsWire before that) for so long I'm really used to low-latency feed UI. I think web UI can match that, but NewsBlur…
Comment linking /files/newsblur-glitch.png
on “The NewsBlur Redesign”Two months ago, someone made one for Servo, in Rust: https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/files/servo-graph.svg https://crates.io/crates/cargo-graph can be used to produce them easily. Rust is somewhere between Ruby and Node here: leaning towards small modules (one of my crates is in this graph, and it exports four functions), but not to the same level. > It would be neat to visualise which language/framework has > the worst…
Comment linking /files/servo-graph.svg
on “Dependency graphs of Go web frameworks”I wrote a little script a few years ago to make a nice map out of my location history: https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/writing/2012/11/28/tracing-a-path...
Comment linking /writing/2012/11/28/tracing-a-path.html
on “Analyzing My Google Location History”I built my own version of this about two years ago: https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/writing/2012/11/28/tracing-a-path... Python code available here: https://github.com/djc/galatna
Comment linking /writing/2012/11/28/tracing-a-path.html
on “Map Your Google Location History”https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/writing/2018/07/15/science-fictio...
Comment linking /writing/2018/07/15/science-fiction-recommendations.html
on “Neal Stephenson – Announcing Termination Shock”
