Top all-time · #2647
Erik Naggum
Personal blog · naggum.noprogrammingphilosophy
Erik Naggum's personal blog at naggum.no covers programming and philosophy. Since 2007, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 39 times, most often “A Long, Painful History of Time (1999)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- A Long, Painful History of Time (1999)22 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2009-04-05
- The Long, Painful History of Time (1999)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-30
- Lisp:Good News Bad News How to Win Big2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2007-07-04
- /erik/complexity.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-03-26
What Hacker News says?
Obligatory Erik Naggum essay -- possibly his best ever: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?”Submitted A Long, Painful History of Time (1999) as a story · 43 points
HN discussionI like a lot of what Joel writes, but I profoundly disagree with him on this, and I'm not alone in my dislike of accidental complexity which, which I think is now an order of magnitude greater than essential complexity. So there is a "silver bullet". It just needs someone to bite it. The author of the article recognizes there's a problem, but is less clear on how to go about solving it. A clue is in this article by…
Comment linking /erik/complexity.html
on “Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System”Submitted The Long, Painful History of Time as a story · 33 points
HN discussionDST adds complexity to the already ugly mess timezones are. Timezones are literally driven by real-world politics, and they can be as messy as only humans can invent. See also: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on ““Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)”Submitted The Long, Painful History of Time (1999) as a story · 27 points
HN discussionErik Naggum's paper The Long, Painful History of Time is a must-read: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “What every programmer should know about time”Submitted The Long, Painful History of Time as a story · 21 points
HN discussionAn interesting writeup on using a different representation for time is here[1]. It can represent any specific second from March 1, 2000 +/-2.9Myears with 62 bits and can efficiently calculate Gregorian dates using only 32-bit arithmetic. An optimization involving a 156K lookup table is also discussed. A few notes for those not familiar with Lisp: 1. Common Lisp defines a time called "universal time" that is similar…
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “A Fast 64-Bit Date Algorithm (30–40% faster by counting dates backwards)”Submitted The Long, Painful History of Time as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYeah, this list is woefully incomplete. Here's another good read: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time”Submitted Lisp:Good News Bad News How to Win Big as a story · 3 points
HN discussionObLink: Erik Naggum's The Long, Painful History of Time ( http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html )
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time”Submitted The Long, Painful History of Time (1999) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou might enjoy Naggum's A Long, Painful History of Time : http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “Forebruary, an endless wall calendar”Submitted The Long, Painful History of Time as a story · 2 points
HN discussionLisp has it done right (recommended reading for all): http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “Storing UTC is not a silver bullet (2019)”Submitted Lisp: Worse is Better, Originally published in 1991 as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>I think it's an acceptance of reality. All of technological progress consists of refusing to roll over and "accept reality" - instead, attacking it and modifying it to suit our needs. >There is a phase change when systems become too complex for a single human to ever understand them in their entirety. This is how innovation dies. The disease is preventable: http://naggum.no/erik/complexity.html > To them, MySql is…
Comment linking /erik/complexity.html
on “Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python”Submitted A Long, Painful History of Time (1999) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWorking through it, thanks. The link in the paper's headers is still live: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html The home page refers to his ill health: http://naggum.no/ And he in fact died in 2009 at 44: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum Interesting guy, involved in specifying the Internet from link level to mid-email level, worked on Emacs, and among the first Usenet users to be known for flaming. I vaguely rem…
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on “Some Notes About Time”Submitted A Long, Painful History of Time as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTangential, but one of the best sources I've seen on issues with times and dates is Eric Naggum's "The Long, Painful History of Time". http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html Notably, besides outlining the complexity of the domain, the article also serves as explanation of decisions made by author in implementing local-time, a popular date/time library for Common Lisp.
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “All about java.util.Date”And yet another good read is Erik Naggum's "The Long, Painful History of Time" http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html which describes better way for storing date(time)?s.
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “Dealing with Timezones in Python ”One could argue that a date is a region in spacetime. It starts at the dateline, spreads eastward, and ends at the dateline some 48 hours later. (Edit: 50 hours is closer to the truth. And one could quibble about the definition of “dateline”, as Samoa moved across it once.) Interesting take from 1999: Erik Naggum: The Long, Painful History of Time http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “The Kobayashi Maru of comparing dates with times”Since nobody else has mentioned this, an interesting essay on time by Erik Naggum; it was done with thought to implementing a time library for common-lisp, but should be readable for non-lisp users: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “Start sending dates the right way (aka The ISO8601 101)”> hairy problems with numerous, poor implementations. I.e. a page on implementing a library for handling times and dates You could start with http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “Semantic Versioning - A technique for avoiding "dependency hell"”I happened to be at the 40th LISP anniversary conference 1998, with John McCarthy. Erann's JPL talk about the Remote Agent was by far the most interesting talk there, and I still consider it one of the best conference talks ever. I'd really like to see the slides being published. I also attended this famous "dinner with eric" at the same conference, actually sitting next to Eric and Erann was sitting on the other si…
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “Lisping at JPL (2002)”Be careful with introducing monetary rewards. Rewards can sometimes have weird psychological effects on people, and may actually lessen their willingness to contribute because the task comes to be seen more as "work" than pastime [1] . Small side-note : A special property of the Stackoverflow system is that the user's profile can actually gain a value on its own, by reflecting so well on the user that it can be incl…
Comment linking /motivation.html
on “Ask HN: I need you but have no money. What can I offer you instead?”As a reminder of how painful and complicated dealing with time is, here is an excellent essay by Erik Naggum: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
Comment linking /lugm-time.html
on “Modernized time.h for ISO C (1998)”
