Top all-time · #4669
Hendrik Erz
Personal blog · hendrik-erz.de/postprogrammingwriting
Hendrik Erz's personal blog at hendrik-erz.de covers programming and writing. Since 2022, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Why You Shouldn't Use SQLite”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's posts on technical and research topics, such as SQLite for research data, LLM behaviour, code signing and Electron. Most comments only cite them; a few judge them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Landing page
Most-linked posts?
- /post/should-you-use-sqlite4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-04-05
- Why You Shouldn't Use SQLite3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-04-28
- /post/why-gzip-just-beat-a-large-language-model2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-12-28
What Hacker News says?
Suppose you wanted to train an LLM to do addition. An LLM has limited parameters. If an LLM had infinite parameters it could just memorize the results of every single addition question in existence and could not claim to have understood anything. Because it has finite parameters, if an LLM wants to get a lower loss on all addition questions, it needs to come up with a general algorithm to perform addition. Indeed, N…
Comment linking /post/why-gzip-just-beat-a-large-language-model
on “NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances”Submitted Coding and Keyboards (2023) as a story · 28 points
HN discussionI think NYT is going to win. LLMs are arguably compressed data archives with weird algorithms. The fact that they will regularly regurgitate verbatim quotes of training data is evidence of this, as are the guardrails that try to prevent this. The second piece of evidence is this paper explained here https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/why-gzip-just-beat-a-large-l... where instead of an LLM researchers used gzip compress…
Comment linking /post/why-gzip-just-beat-a-large-language-model
on “NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances”Submitted Why You Shouldn't Use SQLite as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI didn’t read the whole thing but the intro seems even handed: https://hendrik-erz.de/post/lying-to-your-research-subjects-...
Comment linking /post/lying-to-your-research-subjects-and-other-avoidable-ethical-pitfalls
on “It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead”Submitted You Shouldn't Use SQLite as a story · 5 points
HN discussionBased on comments here, Azure Trusted Signing with a personal certificate and their GitHub action worked. This blog post below is great. It works through the process, including the truly weird/awful UX choices Azure makes. I archived it on wayback in case it ever disappears. https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/code-signing-with-azure-trus...
Comment linking /post/code-signing-with-azure-trusted-signing-on-github-actions
on “A brief history of code signing at Mozilla”Submitted A Rabbit Hole Called WebGL: 8-Part Series on WebGL Application Basics as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI understand the sentiment, but this is why we have the free software sustainability crisis. https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/open-source-has-a-sustainabi... https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/sustainability/sustainability.... The time taken to type out Lorem Ipsum would be worth more than $5. I know you have other options in this case, but why would you prefer to waste your time than spend money?
Comment linking /post/open-source-has-a-sustainability-crisis
on “Show HN: I hate online Lorem Ipsum Generator so I made my own”Submitted Don’t Mix Law and Ethics as a story · 2 points
HN discussionPerhaps this author shouldn't publish their advice about databases. I fully accept that people don't know everything, and I fully support them exploring new things and falling on their faces (if you don't, you aren't really trying). But I object to them offering advice at the same time: the following is from the followup article: https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/should-you-use-sqlite The first argument [in the prior…
Comment linking /post/should-you-use-sqlite
on “Why You Shouldn't Use SQLite”Submitted You shouldn’t Use SQLite as a story · 1 points
HN discussionArticle is from 2021, an update to the article published 2022: In this article I explain where and why I was wrong, and share the real reasons why I think we shouldn't use SQLite for research: A lack of skills and time. https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/should-you-use-sqlite
Comment linking /post/should-you-use-sqlite
on “Why You Shouldn't Use SQLite”Submitted Quo Vadis, PKM? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNot sure why this got posted when the follow-up claws back much of it and leaves a pretty weak conclusion: https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/should-you-use-sqlite
Comment linking /post/should-you-use-sqlite
on “Why You Shouldn't Use SQLite”What, nothing about Electron's unacceptable code bloat factor? Most disappointing! https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/electron-bloated-web-and-tra... A GPT-4-on-GPT-4 flame war might be an incredible spectacle...
Comment linking /post/electron-bloated-web-and-trade-offs
on “Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook”It is confusing that the new link provided in the header was not posted instead: (Link: https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/should-you-use-sqlite ) In which the author clearly says: > About a year ago I fervently advocated against using SQLite for storing research data, but was since proven absolutely wrong. In this article I explain where and why I was wrong, and share the real reasons why I think we shouldn't use SQLi…
Comment linking /post/should-you-use-sqlite
on “You shouldn’t Use SQLite”
