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Dragons in the Algorithm
Personal blog · mcherm.com · on HN as mchermprogrammingwriting
Dragons in the Algorithm is a personal blog at mcherm.com about programming and writing. Since 2008, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 15 times. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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15mentions?
4HN people?
2008–2026first – last linked?
What Hacker News says?
It took me quite some time to get through, but I DID call the New York Times to cancel my membership and share the following note: https://www.mcherm.com/journalistic-ethics.html Interestingly, the person I reached was initially engaging with me but when I began to describe the reason for cancelling my account he sighed and said, "Oh, That." Clearly I was far from the first person to raise the issue today.
Comment linking /journalistic-ethics.html
on “I Am Deleting the Blog”Submitted Deterministic Programming with LLMs as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Exceptions should only be used for exceptional cases. Why? (My thoughts on the matter: http://www.mcherm.com/reasons-why-my-code-style-is-wrong.htm... )
Comment linking /reasons-why-my-code-style-is-wrong.html
on “Parsing JSON is a Minefield”Submitted Unreasonable Legal Agreements as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI work for a bank, and while we have our problems ( http://mcherm.com/permalinks/1/password-in-pieces ), we aren't anywhere NEAR this bad.
Comment linking /permalinks/1/password-in-pieces
on “AmEx: "We discourage the use of special characters because..."”Submitted Go Easy on the Maintenance Programmer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI've asked a few people in the past for a lobster.rs invite and haven't gotten one yet, so I'm interested. Check out my posting history here or my (somewhat neglected) blogging on https://www.mcherm.com . My email is mcherm@mcherm.com.
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on “How some good corporate engineering blogs are written (2020)”> He claims exceptions are fast enough. This is going to vary across languages. In cPython for instance (since I happen to know it), exceptions are at least as fast as looping through an iterator, since exiting from a loop is done via exceptions. He included a link to an article showing that exceptions are quite fast on the JVM. I am sure there are other languages where the implementation of exceptions is slow -- in…
Comment linking /permalinks/1/in-defense-of-the-much-maligned-goto
on “Exceptions for control flow considered perfectly acceptable”> '/s/Exceptions/GOTO/g' and you have essentially the same argument Absolutely untrue. Eliminating GOTO was a major step forward in programming language design, one better known as "Structured Programming". The advantage was that it eliminated random entry points so that bits of code ("subroutines", "methods", or "functions") could be reasoned about independent of the entire program by starting from the "top" and wo…
Comment linking /permalinks/1/in-defense-of-the-much-maligned-goto
on “Exceptions for control flow considered perfectly acceptable”I just recently published a blog post on this topic: https://www.mcherm.com/unique-ids.html Sadly, I am still getting pushback from others at my company who are either not convinced by the math or for whom any such analysis doesn't matter. "Yes, but there is still a chance of getting a duplicate, so I don't think this can be safe."
Comment linking /unique-ids.html
on “The Birthday Paradox”My blog, which is only rarely maintained these days: https://www.mcherm.com
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on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”I host my personal blog on https://www.mcherm.com because to me it's worth a few dollars every few years for domain registration plus a few cents a month (I don't get much traffic) for AWS hosting in order to make it clear that the site is fully owned by me and not be dependent on someone else (like medium) who may have their own agenda. Self-hosted is really cheap. So I guess it IS the proficiency signaling and the…
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on “Ask HN: Why do you use paid domains for personal blogs?”Well, I use a static site generator for my blog ( https://mcherm.com ). It gives me confidence it can scale well and for a blog site static content (with simple dynamic content being rendered in the browser) is just fine.
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on “Ask HN: What do you think about Static Site Generators?”https://www.mcherm.com/ Not updated nearly often enough, but it is not entirely abandoned.
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on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”My own comments on the subject: https://www.mcherm.com/journalistic-ethics.html
Comment linking /journalistic-ethics.html
on “Don't Dox Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex)”