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Entropy Overload
Personal blog · blog.barrkel.com · on HN as barrkelprogrammingsystems
Entropy Overload is a personal blog at blog.barrkel.com about programming and systems. Since 2009, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times. The last post was in 2013, but the archive is still widely read.
17mentions?
3HN people?
2009–2020first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
The one comment links this blog only as the author's personal site, to show that Barry Kelly lives in London and works with Delphi. It does not discuss the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
I wrote about this very problem some time ago: http://blog.barrkel.com/2006/07/fun-with-asynchronous-method... Await is basically a continuation-passing style transform that puts the continuation in the continue handler of the task. The exception handling is also no more or less syntax sugar than the CPS rewrite - it's an error continuation that needs to be routed by querying the underlying Task's properties. But th…
Comment linking /2006/07/fun-with-asynchronous-methods-and.html
on “Callbacks as our Generation's Goto Statement”Submitted Nero throwing Aaron Swartz to the lions as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI didn't want to get dragged into a to and fro, but it looks like I have little choice. I can have multiple workspaces on Windows too, but it doesn't suit my work style. Don't care that smart people disagree with me; there isn't a person in the world with whom I agree on everything. I like to think the things I do differently make me better at some things than most people. Updates: I don't want to break anything, th…
Comment linking /2008/08/venting-on-vista.html
on “MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge”Window management: I prefer cascaded windows (the bottom-left corners effectively start working like tabs - see http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-win... ). Tiled windows are a waste of screen space; I have far more open windows than can ever fit tiled. And what about package managers? Cygwin has a package manager; combined with cygports, it has just about everything I need, resolves dependenci…
Comment linking /2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-windows-7.html
on “MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge”My own thoughts on this, not really a contradiction of the article: http://blog.barrkel.com/2005/10/how-to-be-happy.html The point about writing down to help memory is good. Though I wonder if forgetfulness of bad times isn't part of hedonic adaptation.
Comment linking /2005/10/how-to-be-happy.html
on “A researcher on how to live a happy life”I first started using C# professionally in 2003, after starting out with the betas. I helped implement some key .NET support for the Delphi compiler when I worked at Borland. I'm quite familiar with the evolution since then too. For example, back in 2006, I advocated implementing a CPS transformation to make better use of async code in .NET: http://blog.barrkel.com/2006/07/fun-with-asynchronous-method... It only too…
Comment linking /2006/07/fun-with-asynchronous-methods-and.html
on “Mono Relicensed as MIT”This question I answered many moons ago may be useful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1296683/curiosity-why-doe... Combined with this approach to debugging using `.load sos`: http://blog.barrkel.com/2006/07/not-so-lazy-garbage-collecto... The SOS debugging extension makes following JITted code much easier. Of course if you're looking at async code, or the body of an iterator method, or a lambda body that's captu…
Comment linking /2006/07/not-so-lazy-garbage-collector.html
on “What lies beneath async/await in C#?”It depends on how much other code is depending on the code you're changing. The more that depends on it, the higher the stakes for making large modifications on it, and the higher the degree of implicit assumptions which are very hard to fully capture in tests and specifications. But if you have solid tests and spec for the area, I fully agree: be bold (I wrote earlier: http://blog.barrkel.com/2008/07/be-bold.html )…
Comment linking /2008/07/be-bold.html
on “Code Fearlessly”I've been blogging about this for longer than Sasha Goldshtein (if his blog is the evidence), see e.g.: http://blog.barrkel.com/2006/05/call-vs-callvirt-for-c-non-v... I'm no longer super-interested in .net internals though.
Comment linking /2006/05/call-vs-callvirt-for-c-non-virtual.html
on “Resources for Learning about .NET Internals”It's 3600. 1920x1200 on one screen, 1680x1050 on the other. There's a trick to window management - I use cascading windows on the second monitor, as I detail here: http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-win...
Comment linking /2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-windows-7.html
on “Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding”I live with Windows 7 on two monitors, combined pixel area approximately 3600x1200, and it's still not enough even with Windows's more condensed by default tree views, list views, menu bars, toolbars etc. I have e.g. my desktop icons dialed down to 32x32px. I like my toolbar buttons 16x16px. I like my buttons approximately 75x25px. Information density. When running XP, as I still do on my non-Linux laptops, the tota…
Comment linking /2008/08/venting-on-vista.html
on “Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding”Scheme is implemented via a CPS transform, so a server built around this approach ought to be quite possible on a good Scheme implementation, or a Lisp implementation that supports the moral equivalent of call/cc. Functional languages are also frequently implemented using CPS as an intermediate form. Smalltalk also supports continuations, as I understand it; the Seaside framework for Smalltalk is a server implementa…
Comment linking /2006/07/fun-with-asynchronous-methods-and.html
on “How do we kick our synchronous addiction?”I use Nexenta (my ZFS build is described here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794640 and here: http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/03/zfssolaris-as-nas.html ). The nice thing about Nexenta is that it's an Debian/Ubuntu-style userland (the default install is console only I think, but that's the way I like it).
Comment linking /2009/03/zfssolaris-as-nas.html
on “Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf”Unfortunately, I use cascaded windows as a way of selecting which window I want active. I detailed my technique here: http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-win... This means that my browser window, in its natural shape for cascaded windows on a wide screen, is approximately square: the left hand side of the wide screen is filled with the left edges of smaller windows (mostly terminals, sometimes w…
Comment linking /2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-windows-7.html
on “Tabs on the side?”The article was written by someone called Martin Matusiak, or at least that's what it says on his home page [1]. Apparently he lives in Utrecht. barrkel's blog [2] (linked off his HN profile), on the other hand, says his name is Barry Kelly, and he lives in London. They do, however, both work with Delphi. [1] http://www.matusiak.eu/numerodix/ [2] http://blog.barrkel.com/
Comment linking /
on “Classes of functions (partial, total, bijective, injective, etc)”I use a black background with a very carefully placed light grey diagonal line that corresponds to the lower left-hand corner of my second monitor, which is to the right of my primary monitor. I use this line to align the bottom-left corners of cascading windows on the secondary monitor. In this way, the corners of the windows themselves form a kind of "spatial taskbar" that lets me switch between console windows, e…
Comment linking /2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-windows-7.html
on “How A Desktop Background Can Improve Productivity”I wrote a reasonably extensive post on all the things that annoyed me about Vista here (and many of them are also applicable to 7): http://blog.barrkel.com/2008/08/venting-on-vista.html
Comment linking /2008/08/venting-on-vista.html
on “"With Windows 7, PC users will at last have a..."”