Top all-time · #8180
Jacob Krall
Personal blog · jacob.jkrall.net · on HN as kralljaprogrammingsystems
Jacob Krall writes Lost In Permutation, a personal blog at jacob.jkrall.net about programming and systems. Since 2011, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times, most often “Benford's law”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link Jacob Krall's Wasabi series, about the language Joel Spolsky built and retired, with code samples, and his FizzBuzz-without-multiplication-or-division series.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Benford's law2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-11-03
- Beginner's Guide to TOTP2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-09-05
- Wasabi: The ??? Parts2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-06-25
- /wasabi-the-parts/introduction.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-06-25
What Hacker News says?
"the fact remains that we had a Classic ASP application running on Linux and we didn’t have to pay anybody for the privilege." [0] Commercial reasons dictated why Wasabi was created and retired. Bravo Joel. [0] http://jacob.jkrall.net/wasabi-the-parts/introduction.html
Comment linking /wasabi-the-parts/introduction.html
on “Killing Off Wasabi”Submitted Wasabi: The ??? Parts as a story · 63 points
HN discussionIf you go to the trouble to write your own language, make it not terrible? Public Abstract Class Animal Abstract Function Speak() As String Overridable Function Eat() As String Return "Yum!" End Function End Class Public Class Dog Inherits Animal Override Function Speak() Return "Woof!" End Function Override Function Eat() Return Base.Eat() & " Woof!" End Function End Class http://jacob.jkrall.net/wasabi-the-parts/c…
Comment linking /wasabi-the-parts/classes.html
on “Killing Off Wasabi”Submitted FizzBuzz without multiplication or division as a story · 24 points
HN discussionRespectfully, their example code is the following: <% <WebEntryPoint("example.asp")> _ Sub Example() %> <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>An Example Wasabi Program</title> <meta charset="utf-8"> </head> <body> <h1>An Example Wasabi Program</h1> <p>Arithmetic: 1 + 1 = <%= 1 + 1 %></p> <p>Dynamic Content: x + y = <%= IntRequest("x") + IntRequest("y") %> </body> </html> <% End Sub %> I mean, they basically went to t…
Comment linking /wasabi-the-parts/a_first_program.html
on “Killing Off Wasabi”Submitted PS/2 keyboard on a 65C02 breadboard computer as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe author has graciously posted _Wasabi, The ??? Parts_, the internal book about Wasabi mentioned in the blog, on their website: http://jacob.jkrall.net/wasabi-the-parts/index.html Having now read it, I've come to the conclusion that the blog gives the wrong impression about the implications of having a custom language. Readers of the blog post come away with the idea that Wasabi was so full of "o.O" that someone w…
Comment linking /wasabi-the-parts/index.html
on “Killing Off Wasabi”Submitted Benford's law as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWasabi: The ??? Parts http://jacob.jkrall.net/wasabi-the-parts/
Comment linking /wasabi-the-parts/
on “Killing Off Wasabi”Submitted Benford’s Law and S3 Buckets as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI actually picked SHA256 for the path-prefix feature in https://jacob.jkrall.net/benfords-law for “NIST compliance.” That is, I didn’t ever want to answer “yes” to a potential customer’s CISO security surveys question like “does your application use any non-NIST-approved hashing functions?” It’s frankly broken that evidence-handling doesn’t have to follow the government's advice about hash function selection!
Comment linking /benfords-law
on “The Curious Case of MD5”Submitted Beginner's Guide to TOTP as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttp://jacob.jkrall.net/wasabi-the-parts/introduction.html this doesn't suffice? It's the very first chapter.
Comment linking /wasabi-the-parts/introduction.html
on “Wasabi: The ??? Parts”Submitted Binary Boolean Operators: The Lost Levels as a story · 2 points
HN discussionLove it. This reminds me somewhat of a similar issue I saw in 2012, where Cheezburger.com went down over Thanksgiving weekend because we had no deploys for more than 80 hours, and an accidental per-server cache filled up in about that much time. https://jacob.jkrall.net/turkey-day-down-time
Comment linking /turkey-day-down-time
on “The 4 Minute Bug”Submitted Beginner's Guide to TOTP as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIn the case of FogBugz, the muck is the problem they decided to create for themselves (lots of targets to run on) that justifies solving the non-core business problem (creating Wasabi[1]). Or does it? [2] That kind of thing runs contrary to what I usually recommend and see recommended. It would be interesting to get a recent Spolsky take on it. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/01/wasabi/ [2] https://jacob.…
Comment linking /killing-off-wasabi-part-1
on “Where there’s muck, there’s brass (2007)”Submitted JavaScript tail-call optimization using exceptions as a story · 1 points
HN discussionPart 2 ( http://jacob.jkrall.net/fizzbuzz-without-multiplication-or-d... ) has my favorite solution in the series.
Comment linking /fizzbuzz-without-multiplication-or-division-p
on “FizzBuzz without multiplication or division”Uptime-related crashes seem fairly common. Here’s one of my stories, from Thanksgiving 2012: https://jacob.jkrall.net/turkey-day-down-time I’ve seen a couple others since, but they had the same general shape so didn’t bother writing the same story again.
Comment linking /turkey-day-down-time
on “Uptime Related Server Crashes”
