Top all-time · #5125
Jacob Davis-Hansson
Personal blog · tech.davis-hansson.com · on HN as jakewinsprogrammingsystems
Jacob Davis-Hansson's personal blog at tech.davis-hansson.com covers programming and systems. Since 2019, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “An opinionated approach to GNU Make”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jacob Davis-Hansson's guide to writing Makefiles, which covers practical rules such as output sentinel files for multi-file targets and avoiding cryptic make variables. Other comments only mention it as a link.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Blog on programming and stuff around it
Most-linked posts?
- An opinionated approach to GNU Make9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-12-17
- I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know, guess what happened next (2016)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-12-17
What Hacker News says?
Pro-rated billing is one of the many places outside of database query planners where Dynamic Programming is useful! Maybe there's a better way to do it, but well, if you give a man a hammer.. I wrote up how we did this at Equipmentshare back in 2016: https://tech.davis-hansson.com/p/price-wars.html
Comment linking /p/price-wars.html
on “Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers”Submitted An opinionated approach to GNU Make as a story · 414 points
HN discussionThere's lots of different opinions on how to use Make, but here's one. https://tech.davis-hansson.com/p/make/
Comment linking /p/make/
on “Workerd: Open-source Cloudflare workers runtime”Submitted The logging framework isn't a bottleneck, and other lies your laptop tells you as a story · 237 points
HN discussion* AWK - I read "The Awk Programming Language"[0] cover to cover. It's a very well written text, and it not all that long. The examples are very impressive. In terms of bang-for-the-buck of learning tools, AWK has definitely given me the most mileage. I probably use it at least a dozen times a day just for little things. However, you can wield it to write some very powerful scripts in very short amounts of time. * Ma…
Comment linking /p/make/
on “Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?”Submitted An opinionated approach to GNU Make as a story · 185 points
HN discussionYeah agreed, CI infra provides tons of value. Ended up expanding this little quip into a blogpost to refer to in the future, feedback welcome! https://tech.davis-hansson.com/p/ci-offgrid/
Comment linking /p/ci-offgrid/
on “GitHub: Git operation failures”Submitted Makefiles Are Wrong (2019) as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI've found these guidelines for Makefiles make for a pretty good experience using make: https://tech.davis-hansson.com/p/make/ The advice on output sentinel files for rules creating multiple files helps keep rebuilding dependencies reliable. Avoiding most of the cryptic make variables also helps Makefiles to remain easily understandable when you're not frequently working on them. And using .ONESHELL to allow multi-l…
Comment linking /p/make/
on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Makefiles”Submitted I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know, guess what happened next (2016) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionVery similar experience with several libraries. Wrote up a particularly pleasant one a few years ago: https://tech.davis-hansson.com/p/clickbait/
Comment linking /p/clickbait/
on “Show HN: qqqa – A fast, stateless LLM-powered assistant for your shell”Submitted Makefiles Are Wrong (2019) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI think you would enjoy applying dynamic programming to this problem! I have a simple example, starting from a “generate all possible combinations” python function, here: https://tech.davis-hansson.com/p/price-wars.html
Comment linking /p/price-wars.html
on “My first superoptimizer”Submitted I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHey HN, I built randomneo.city since people didn't like my comment on the randomgeo.city post[0]. Clearly I don't take downvotes well. That said, the code is powered by SvelteKit, SQLite and open source: https://gitlab.com/mrman/randomneocity I have to say, I'm really starting to like building everything with SvelteKit -- I'm a huge 3-tier architecture fan, and it just doesn't make sense these days to add an API rep…
Comment linking /p/make/
on “Show HN: Randomneo.city – Browse Neocities at Random”Submitted Adwords is being used to spoof news headlines as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Senate is a stack machine, the filibuster a halting problem as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The United States Congress is an elegant stack machine as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Your Makefiles Are Wrong as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted When are full database backups faster than incremental backups? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Trusting the contributors of django-money as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
