Top all-time · #917
Entropic Thoughts
Personal blog · two-wrongs.comdatamathsystems
Entropic Thoughts is a personal blog at two-wrongs.com about data, math and systems. Since 2015, 74 different Hacker News readers have linked it 258 times, most often “Statistical Process Control: A Practitioner's Guide (2022)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Statistical Process Control: A Practitioner's Guide (2022)5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-11-08
- Practices of Reliable Software Design5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-08-14
- The Awk state machine parser pattern (2018)4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-04-03
- The Misunderstood Kelly Criterion4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-09-25
- Tindall on Software Delays4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-06-15
- Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-09-01
- Huffman Codes – How Do They Work?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-11-09
- Common Mistakes in Modularisation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-02-26
- SI Units for Request Rate3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-31
- The Bug in the Physical Building3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-05-03
What Hacker News says?
> A portfolio with low risks and high returns? [...] Of course, if you already know the exact weights Or! In this case, it reduces to a one-dimensional optimisation thanks to the structure of the problem. What we're optimising in portfolio selection is not the return of a single investment, but of a lifetime of investments. And thanks to compounding, that is a function of both risk and return. So we can find the opt…
Comment linking /the-misunderstood-kelly-criterion.html
on “Mario meets Pareto”Submitted Useful Uses of cat as a story · 274 points
HN discussion> I've been using .NET for far over a decade now. I even was at one of the hackathons for Windows Phone developers back in the day. This conversation comes up from time to time. It is sometimes difficult to talk to developers who have a perception of .NET that predates .NET Core 3.1 or so and newer. Windows Phone and its tooling is older. I am sad UWP has died, the ecosystem needs something better than what we have…
Comment linking /dotnet-on-linux-update
on “Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team”Submitted Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018) as a story · 247 points
HN discussionIf you just want to get into .NET (C# or F#) on non-Windows platforms, the latest .NET release (at the time of writing, 8.0) is what you want. The development experience is good these days. For a historic summary of why it used to be a confusing situation (up until maybe 2020), see https://two-wrongs.com/dotnet-on-non-windows-platforms-brief... That also has some background on why the Mono project found itself in a…
Comment linking /dotnet-on-non-windows-platforms-brief-historic-summary
on “Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team”Submitted Code reviews do find bugs as a story · 221 points
HN discussionTables of contents are tricky. My publishing logic is rather flexible in how I use them, so I used to put them into the margins of longer articles[1] and sometimes even shorter ones[2] although I wasn't great at always remembering to do it[3]. But the problem for me is that good headlines, that give a fair summary of the section they are for, make for really wide tables of contents which don't fit neatly into the ma…
Comment linking /what-is-probability.html
on “Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites”Submitted Technical Writing: Learning from Kernighan as a story · 180 points
HN discussionYeah, this is a big problem. I wanted to understand the differences between just C#, F#, .NET Standard, .NET Framework, and .NET Core, and it took a somewhat long article[1] just to figure that out! [1]: .NET on Non-Windows Platforms, a Brief History. https://two-wrongs.com/dotnet-on-non-windows-platforms-brief...
Comment linking /dotnet-on-non-windows-platforms-brief-historic-summary.html
on “.NET 5.0”Submitted The Awk state machine parser pattern (2018) as a story · 169 points
HN discussionOr indeed any time complexity need to be layered. A VM design doesn't even have to have an explicit bytecode compilation stage -- you can write an interpreter that runs as the instructions are issued. David Parnas talks a lot about this as a way to reliable modularisation: https://two-wrongs.com/deliberate-abstraction.html
Comment linking /deliberate-abstraction.html
on “Why SQLite Uses Bytecode”Submitted Types as Interfaces as a story · 159 points
HN discussionThis is as good a place as any for the reminder, so here goes: The organisation that bears Helen Keller's name does an outstanding job of giving children vitamin A, which helps prevent both blindness and other common diseases like malaria and diarrhea by improving immune systems.[1] They are frequently rated among the top few when it comes to being able to use donations efficiently. They save a lot of suffering for…
Comment linking /why-donate-to-charity
on “Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908)”Submitted The Bug in the Physical Building as a story · 148 points
HN discussionOne thing that annoys me about funny 404 pages is that they tend to assume that either a) the content referenced by the URL was deleted intentionally, or b) the user mistyped the URL. While in practise, the majority of the time I hit a 404 page, it is due to malpractise by the webmaster. A 404 page has to be very funny to offset the fact that it often is very unhelpful and blames the user for the webmaster's faults.…
Comment linking /404
on “Why wasn't this page found?”Submitted .NET on Linux: What a Contrast as a story · 117 points
HN discussionThis mirrors things I've read in Gregory's Savage Money . Most people on this website live in cultures where the value system places prestige upon accruing money, so it's easy for us to do so because the incentives line up. In parts of India that's not so. To simplify a little, their value systems places prestige upon spending money on social events/life cycle rituals, so it's easy for them to spend money on e.g. a…
Comment linking /book-review-savage-money.html
on “The Marshmallow Test does not reliably predict adult functioning”Submitted SI Units for Request Rate as a story · 111 points
HN discussionIf at some point you want to feel what it's like to be that crazy, there's a chance you'll find that it's actually not that crazy at all! When I created the current iteration of my website[1], I started out just adding some custom export formatting advice to the default ox functions. I couldn't resist add some additional functionality, though, and it takes refreshingly little work: There's one function that iterates…
Comment linking /
on “Org-Mode Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text (2018)”Submitted How Laziness Works as a story · 108 points
HN discussionAfter over a decade of programming in various more and less popular languages, I became a manager. I no longer had time to write real code but I needed to be able to automate things still, so I learned Perl. Then I discovered one of Perl's best kept secrets: it allows you to write real code, if you want to. Now I'm back to being a regular programmer again but I just happen to be more productive with Perl than anythi…
Comment linking /why-perl.html
on “93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)”Submitted On Competing with C Using Haskell (2017) as a story · 101 points
HN discussion> Unless you are getting the economics of saving the day (you are a large equity holder / partner) ... Even if you are a large equity partner it's at best short-sighted. I have written about this before[1] but the gist of it is that even when individual heroics saves a project it has robbed the project manager of valuable feedback regarding how the planning was deficit. [1]: https://two-wrongs.com/hidden-cost-of-her…
Comment linking /hidden-cost-of-heroics.html
on “The Time I Lied to the CTO and Saved the Day”Submitted Common Mistakes in Modularisation as a story · 96 points
HN discussionI was the sort of person who did not believe in memorisation as a solution for anything. Then I tried getting really good at spaced repetition for a year (yes, it is a skill that needs to be trained for good results) and I've completely changed my mind. Spaced repetition allows me to become proficient even in things I don't get the natural opportunity to practise daily, so that when the day comes and I need them, I…
Comment linking /inventing-fishers-exact-test.html
on “Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?”Submitted When Is a Counter-Strike Player Good? as a story · 89 points
HN discussionI hate how awk gets so much praise for one liners when it's so good at building things like state machines too: https://two-wrongs.com/awk-state-machine-parser-pattern.html I've got some similar ones for work that take data csv like data and output sql. A little bit of vim-foo on the csv (yy10000p) and I've got all the test data I need.
Comment linking /awk-state-machine-parser-pattern.html
on “Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than a Hadoop Cluster (2014)”Submitted Markov Chains for Queueing Systems as a story · 87 points
HN discussionI wrote a lot of articles on fundamentals (verifiable time estimation, leverage points with systems theory, using the Kelly criterion to shape project portfolio, system observability, evolution, etc.) with the intention of ending up on lists like these. None of them gained much traction, which means I need to get better at condensing the key points. In the end, I think my most popular article of the year ended up be…
Comment linking /tindall-on-software-delays.html
on “Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023”Submitted Map of Pontypandy in Fireman Sam as a story · 85 points
HN discussion
