Top all-time · #289
Fred Hébert
Personal blog · ferd.ca · on HN as mononcqcsystemsprogrammingwriting
Fred Hébert writes Ferd.ca, a personal blog at ferd.ca about systems, programming and writing. Since 2010, 169 different Hacker News readers have linked it 287 times, most often “The Zen of Erlang (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 22 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Fred Hébert's posts on Erlang/OTP reliability and overload, and his awk-in-20-minutes tutorial, calling them clear, thorough and worth reading.
- Recommended for · 22 comments
- a clear, brief awk introduction; a good summary of Erlang; a very thorough overload article; an insightful look that is fair to both sides
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Zen of Erlang (2016)17 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2017-12-16
- Awk in 20 Minutes (2015)12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2017-12-23
- Queues don't fix overload (2014)9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-05-27
- Complexity Has to Live Somewhere9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-05-01
- Handling Overload (2016)8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-09-06
- An Open Letter to the Erlang Beginner (or Onlooker)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2011-01-05
- Queues Don't Fix Overload6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-11-19
- The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-06-09
- Home Alone: A Post-Incident Review6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-12-27
- Negotiable Abstractions6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-12-21
What Hacker News says?
Complexity has to live somewhere. The genius is in putting in places that make things manageable, I guess. https://ferd.ca/complexity-has-to-live-somewhere.html
Comment linking /complexity-has-to-live-somewhere.html
on “Cognitive load is what matters”Submitted Goodbye Joe as a story · 875 points
HN discussionHave you considered the opposite? Reflected on your own biases? I’m listening to my own experience. Just today I gave it another fair shot. GitHub Copilot agent mode with GPT-4.1. Still unimpressed. This is a really insightful look at why people perceive the usefulness of these models differently. It is fair to both sides without being dismissive as one side just not “getting it” or how we should be “so far” past de…
Comment linking /the-gap-through-which-we-praise-the-machine.html
on “The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering”Submitted Awk in 20 Minutes (2015) as a story · 762 points
HN discussionErlang/OTP and Elixir on top of that, brings more than 30 years of experience of building Reliable, Scalable and High Available Systems. It's difficult to fight this. Somebody new to Erlang can get a feel of what Systems Architecture in Erlang really means from a great article by Fred Hebert: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Unexpected" https://ferd.ca/the-hitchhiker-s-guide-to-the-unexpected.htm...
Comment linking /the-hitchhiker-s-guide-to-the-unexpected.html
on “Give Me Back My Monolith”Submitted Ten Years of Erlang as a story · 567 points
HN discussionNot exactly sure what bits GP is referring to, but IMO this is a good summary of what makes Erlang work: https://ferd.ca/the-zen-of-erlang.html
Comment linking /the-zen-of-erlang.html
on “Monolith First (2015)”Submitted The Little Printf as a story · 529 points
HN discussionA couple of days ago this clear, brief introduction to AWK was submitted: http://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html
Comment linking /awk-in-20-minutes.html
on “Command-line tools can be faster than your Hadoop cluster”Submitted Awk in 20 Minutes as a story · 504 points
HN discussionI originally thought it is a really story about `input` like the one with `printf` - http://ferd.ca/the-little-printf.html
Comment linking /the-little-printf.html
on “A story about <input>”Submitted A distributed systems reading list as a story · 330 points
HN discussionThat technique sounds analogous to using a zipper to traverse a list (I've found a decent looking link for the technique if you're interested - https://ferd.ca/yet-another-article-on-zippers.html )
Comment linking /yet-another-article-on-zippers.html
on “Text Editor: Data Structures”Submitted Complexity Has to Live Somewhere as a story · 324 points
HN discussionHere are mine: - https://franz.hamburg - https://www.project-daily.com Some blogs I follow via RSS (using the awesome NetNewsWire app): - https://brendangregg.com - https://brandur.org/ - https://ferd.ca/
Comment linking /
on “If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)”Submitted The Zen of Erlang as a story · 301 points
HN discussion"If you like this you might also like" https://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html I too am happy to see more Awk material in the world, once I learned a bit about it I started reaching for it more and more.
Comment linking /awk-in-20-minutes.html
on “Understanding Awk”Submitted The Zen of Erlang (2016) as a story · 236 points
HN discussionSay you have a bug in a minor feature, that most people wouldn’t care about, but triggers the crash. Now someone’s trying to use this feature once or twice per minute. If you rely on the infra for recovery, you’re going to be in serious trouble. There may be 300k users connected to an app instance, and you’re going to be kicking all of them out and restarting an instance every time the minor feature is called. This…
Comment linking /the-zen-of-erlang.html
on “How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users (2017)”Submitted The Little Printf as a story · 208 points
HN discussionSpeaking of awesome, check out other stuff Fred Hebert wrote. Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good: http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ His blog posts are great too: http://ferd.ca/ And his new (free) book, Erlang In Anger: http://www.erlang-in-anger.com/
Comment linking /
on “Awk in 20 Minutes”Submitted Queues Don't Fix Overload as a story · 205 points
HN discussionIf you find awk unreadable, maybe check out this link? https://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html I actually find awk very readable. It's a far simpler language than Python really. The exception is perhaps if you need to do something complex, like parse a csv.
Comment linking /awk-in-20-minutes.html
on “Minimal safe Bash script template”Submitted A Pipeline Made of Airbags as a story · 198 points
HN discussionMy favorite Awk reference is this: https://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html Also, a handy trick is to combine awk and cut. For example I had a log line that had a variable amount of columns just in one field, but immediately after the field was a comma. I cut based on the comma: cut -d, -f1,2 and then awk'd the last column: cut -d, -f1,2 | awk '{ print $2" "$5" "$NF }' So, sometimes awk and cut can help each other.
Comment linking /awk-in-20-minutes.html
on “Why Learn Awk? (2016)”Submitted My Blog Engine Is the Erlang Build Tool as a story · 193 points
HN discussionHere's a dump of the "Programming" folder from my RSS reader: Aphyr's (aka the guy behind the Jepsen distributed system test series): https://aphyr.com/ Fred Herbert, the author of Learn You Some Erlang: http://ferd.ca/ Eevee, who posts a mishmash of stuff about programming in general but these days is mostly focussed on games: https://eev.ee/ Tef/Programming is Terrible, which features strong opinions about program…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow?”Submitted Queues don't fix overload (2014) as a story · 193 points
HN discussion> Implement backpressure throughout your system. This is a subtle one and gets lost among CAP theorem talk, but it is important. Just recently had to struggle with adding backpressure. Did some things as just sending a message (a "gen_server:cast" in Erlang). The sender shoved all 300K+ messages in the mailbox of receiver which could not process them in time because of a bottleneck and bug. Receiver's memory usage w…
Comment linking /beating-the-cap-theorem-checklist.html
on “Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013)”Submitted Erlang/OTP 21's new logger as a story · 193 points
HN discussion
