Top all-time · #5515
Greg Grothaus
Personal blog · gregable.com · on HN as ggrotprogrammingmath
Greg Grothaus writes Gregable, a personal blog at gregable.com about programming and math. Since 2007, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 32 times, most often “Learn just a little Awk (2010)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Greg Grothaus's awk posts, mainly "Why you should learn just a little Awk", as a short, practical introduction to awk. A regex puzzle post is also mentioned.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Blog of Greg Grothaus.
Most-linked posts?
- Learn just a little Awk (2010)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-01-22
- Reservoir Sampling3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2007-10-21
- Why you should learn at least a little bit of Awk2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-09-29
- /p/regexp-puzzle.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-03-11
What Hacker News says?
Very well put together. If you are curious about the weighted version, I tried to explain it some here: https://gregable.com/2007/10/reservoir-sampling.html There's also a distributed version, easy with a map reduce. Or the very simple algorithm: generate a random paired for each item in the stream and keep the top N ordered by that random.
Comment linking /2007/10/reservoir-sampling.html
on “Reservoir Sampling”Submitted Learn just a little Awk (2010) as a story · 684 points
HN discussionAwk. Actually a full programming language but i usually use it for quick one liners: http://gregable.com/2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little-...
Comment linking /2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little-awk.html
on “What's the one Linux command you wish you knew years ago?”Submitted Learn Just a Little Awk (2010) as a story · 277 points
HN discussionAnother good resource is "Why you should learn just a little Awk: An Awk tutorial by Example"[0] [0] https://gregable.com/2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little...
Comment linking /2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little-awk.html
on “Why Learn Awk? (2016)”Submitted Why you should learn just a little Awk - A Tutorial by Example as a story · 224 points
HN discussionWhy you should learn just a little Awk: https://gregable.com/2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little...
Comment linking /2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little-awk.html
on “The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]”Submitted Why you should learn at least a little bit of Awk as a story · 162 points
HN discussionI also created an HTML-based version of this one some time ago that allows rotation and color codes the rows as matching or not: https://gregable.com/p/regexp-puzzle.html
Comment linking /p/regexp-puzzle.html
on “Regex Puzzle”Submitted Regular Expression Crossword Puzzle as a story · 148 points
HN discussionEvery time I come up with some crazy bash construction someone shows me how I could have done it more elegantly with AWK and nothing else. <3 https://gregable.com/2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little...
Comment linking /2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little-awk.html
on “Problem solving with Unix commands”Submitted Reservoir Sampling as a story · 11 points
HN discussionWhy is this linking to the wayback machine? This blog post is live on the same website at the same url. https://gregable.com/2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little...
Comment linking /2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little-awk.html
on “Learn Just a Little Awk (2010)”Submitted Why not regulate the voltage with software? as a story · 10 points
HN discussionFor a quick understanding of the power of awk : https://gregable.com/2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little...
Comment linking /2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little-awk.html
on “Seven Unix Commands Every Data Scientist Should Know”Submitted Cool Algorithms: Reservoir Sampling as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThe first regex crossword I ever saw — https://gregable.com/p/regexp-puzzle.html — also was sort of a jumble of letters, but it actually encoded a secret message (I don’t want to say more — spoilers)
Comment linking /p/regexp-puzzle.html
on “A regex crossword from LinkedIn Engineering”Submitted Regular Expression Crossword Puzzle as a story · 5 points
HN discussionShorter and IMO more practical introduction to AWK, http://gregable.com/2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little-...
Comment linking /2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little-awk.html
on “An Awk Primer ”Submitted Stip unused fields from HTML form submissions as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted PQ Tree Algorithm as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Life is NP-Hard as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Reservoir Sampling Explained as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Visualizing a Social Graph as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Using Mechanical Turk for Price Comparison as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why do we even need url shorteners? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The fact that your project runs on language X is not a competitive advantage. as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Regular Expression Crossword Puzzle as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted AMP Email as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted 00 20 29 03 * /sbin/poweroff as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
