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eighty-twenty news
Personal blog · eighty-twenty.orgprogrammingsystems
eighty-twenty news is a personal blog at eighty-twenty.org about programming and systems. Since 2011, 30 different Hacker News readers have linked it 81 times, most often “Mendeley encrypts your data so you can't access it”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Mendeley encrypts your data so you can't access it4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-06-13
- Why Object-Oriented Languages Need Tail Calls (2011)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-09-27
- Why OO Languages Need Tail Calls4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-10-01
- Purely Functional Operating Systems3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-08-14
- History of Actors2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-10-18
- Lying to TCP makes it a best-effort streaming protocol2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-02-01
- Why learn Smalltalk?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-13
- The Weaknesses of Smalltalk Are the Strengths of Erlang (2011)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-07-16
- Smolts: A pedagogical IDE for a teaching language2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-09-04
- UI for sums must remember products2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-21
What Hacker News says?
Mendeley is owned by Elsevier so they’re likely to continue user-hostile things like locking down your data to prevent interoperability: https://eighty-twenty.org/2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db
Comment linking /2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db
on “UC terminates subscriptions with Elsevier in push for open access”Submitted 60x speed-up of Linux “perf” as a story · 477 points
HN discussionIt should be noted that Mendeley encrypts user database, presumably to lock in its users: https://eighty-twenty.org/2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db
Comment linking /2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db
on “Zotero: Personal Research Assistant”Submitted Lying to TCP makes it a best-effort streaming protocol as a story · 213 points
HN discussionGreydon's page is based on my original article: https://eighty-twenty.org/2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db .
Comment linking /2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db
on “Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research”Submitted History of Actors as a story · 69 points
HN discussionI have just recently switched away from Mendeley because of an insanely user-hostile thing they've just done to lock-in their users. Mendeley has started encrypting users' bibliography files (from version 19), claiming variously that encryption is required by GDPR (?!?!) and/or that it improves security on a multiuser system. (Neither of these excuses holds water.) The keys are not available to the users whose data…
Comment linking /2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db
on “Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research”Submitted Smolts: A pedagogical IDE for a teaching language as a story · 54 points
HN discussion> Of particular interest is Henderson’s paper “Purely Functional Operating Systems” which was difficult to find the last I checked. Find it here: https://eighty-twenty.org/2022/06/23/henderson-functional-op...
Comment linking /2022/06/23/henderson-functional-operating-systems-1982
on “Quirky computing books”Submitted Why Object-Oriented Languages Need Tail Calls (2011) as a story · 53 points
HN discussionThey're using SEE, see https://eighty-twenty.org/2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db
Comment linking /2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db
on “Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer”Submitted Monads in Dynamically-Typed Languages as a story · 45 points
HN discussionIt's kind of interesting that TCO goes together with FP, because logically it makes at least as much sense for OOP, as Guy Steele pointed out at http://www.eighty-twenty.org/2011/10/01/oo-tail-calls.html
Comment linking /2011/10/01/oo-tail-calls.html
on “What is “the stack”?”Submitted Developing with Squeak on a Cellphone as a story · 42 points
HN discussionloop/recur is good for replacing structured loops but tail recursion is more general, since it can replace arbitrary gotos. One example is given by Guy Steele in "Why Object-Oriented Languages need Tail Calls". Basically, tail recursion lets you keep O(1) stack space even in the face of opaque method dispatching in OO code. https://eighty-twenty.org/2011/10/01/oo-tail-calls Another required reading are the "Lambda t…
Comment linking /2011/10/01/oo-tail-calls
on “Racket – Lisp beyond Clojure”Submitted Python3 is removing crypt.crypt and not replacing it with anything as a story · 41 points
HN discussionYes, exactly; also, there's an acknowledgement of the influence of "SMALL TALK" at the end of Hewitt, Bishop & Steiger's original 1973 IJCAI paper as it appeared in print ( https://eighty-twenty.org/2016/10/12/hewitt-bishop-steiger-i... ). Actors, Smalltalk, Monitors and CSP all co-evolved during the 1970s, with many of the principals visiting each other and exchanging ideas. Retrospectives like Brinch Hansen's ( ht…
Comment linking /2016/10/12/hewitt-bishop-steiger-ijcai-1973
on “Soup – Alan Kay on Objects”Submitted GRPC.io is interestingly different from CORBA as a story · 39 points
HN discussion> You could pass around explicit dictionaries with all your values or some such, … if you have an extremely low-overhead way of doing so A lot of that plumbing could be hidden from the user given the right dynamic features. http://www.eighty-twenty.org/2015/01/25/monads-in-dynamicall...
Comment linking /2015/01/25/monads-in-dynamically-typed-languages.html
on “A difference between Haskell and Common Lisp”Submitted BitSyntax for Smalltalk as a story · 36 points
HN discussionmonads if the language is functional Monads are not a functional concept. For example an imperative language like Scala (which, being in the ML family of languages has a powerful and first-class functional sublanguage) has monads that work perfectly fine with imperative computation. Indeed, I find it a good programming style to let trivial, ubiquitous monads, like printing / IO / global state, be handled by the buil…
Comment linking /2015/01/25/monads-in-dynamically-typed-languages
on “Error Handling in Go (2016)”Submitted Squeak Smalltalk on a PostmarketOS Cellphone as a story · 28 points
HN discussionThe trick there is to use an explicitly polymorphic instance, which can "decide what it should have been all along" later on. I've written about the idea: https://eighty-twenty.org/2015/01/25/monads-in-dynamically-t... . (OO folklore has long had some form of this idea; in limited forms, you see it in Smalltalk images stretching back decades.)
Comment linking /2015/01/25/monads-in-dynamically-typed-languages
on “Return type polymorphism in Haskell”Submitted Why OO Languages Need Tail Calls as a story · 19 points
HN discussionIMO, Smalltalk-the-system is best thought of as an OS, yes. (Remember how everyone ridiculed the idea of Smalltalk's images right up until virtual machines became a thing?) It has a runtime and a systems programming language, too: the Smalltalk VM, and Smalltalk-the-language. Analogously, Unix has its kernel and C, respectively. The global variables of Smalltalk are analogous to Unix files. Smalltalk processes to Un…
Comment linking /2016/05/05/unix-is-incorrectly-factored
on “SmallTalkUnix”Submitted Why Object-Oriented Languages Need Tail Calls (2009) as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSee also: https://eighty-twenty.org/2011/09/11/code-editor-pane
Comment linking /2011/09/11/code-editor-pane
on “SmallTalkUnix”Submitted M4 Crimes for Metaprogramming Processing as a story · 12 points
HN discussionYou're quite right -- take a look at the original 1973 paper [1], "A Universal Modular ACTOR Formalism for Artificial Intelligence". The "universal" there is intended to mean, among other things, a uniform actor model (comparable to the uniform object model in Smalltalk). It's a remarkable paper. Later actor languages step away from total uniformity, in part because it requires quite some finesse to avoid infinite r…
Comment linking /2016/10/12/hewitt-bishop-steiger-ijcai-1973
on “History of Actors”Submitted The Origins of Flow Control and Acknowledgements (2011) as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
