Top all-time · #10
Jeff Atwood
Personal blog · blog.codinghorror.comprogrammingculture
Jeff Atwood writes Coding Horror, a personal blog at blog.codinghorror.com about programming and culture. Since 2008, 1,270 different Hacker News readers have linked it 1,747 times, most often “Why Can't Programmers.. Program?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jeff Atwood's blog for software practice and culture, often to point to older posts such as 'Code: It's Trivial' and 'Keeping time on the PC'.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- one recommends a PC timekeeping post and an open-source one; two call posts interesting; one says 'so much this'
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.
programming and human factors
Most-linked posts?
- Why Can't Programmers.. Program?71 people · 88 mentions · first linked 2016-06-11
- New Programming Jargon36 people · 39 mentions · first linked 2016-07-04
- The Principle of Least Power (2007)25 people · 32 mentions · first linked 2016-05-19
- Stay Gold, America25 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2016-02-07
- Regular Expressions: Now You Have Two Problems (2008)21 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2016-07-20
- Quantity Always Trumps Quality (2008)21 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2016-07-08
- Object-Relational Mapping Is the Vietnam of Computer Science (2006)20 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2016-05-25
- The Magpie Developer (2008)20 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2017-07-15
- Falling into the Pit of Success (2007)18 people · 23 mentions · first linked 2017-08-18
- /standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/18 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2016-04-05
What Hacker News says?
Do you feel like a digital sharecropper[0] now that the company has sold, or are you happy what you got out of contributing? [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper...
Comment linking /are-you-a-digital-sharecropper/
on “Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B”Submitted Password Rules Are Bullshit as a story · 711 points
HN discussionI hope StackOverflow can continue to be a great source for accurate information, it was hard to find good quality information before they started. Two things I'd wish I had done: 1. Mine a lot of bitcoins back when it was just starting out. 2. Asked Jeff Atwood author of codinghorror.com if he had an extra spot on the team for this new venture called StackOverflow. Here is a link to Jeff talking about the ideas behi…
Comment linking /introducing-stackoverflow-com/
on “Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B”Submitted We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else as a story · 523 points
HN discussionFor the unindoctrinated, context with less elitist snark[1] and discussion from 13 years ago[2]. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/parsing-html-the-cthulhu-way/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944673
Comment linking /parsing-html-the-cthulhu-way/
on “Someone is pretending to be me”Submitted The Raspberry Pi Has Revolutionized Emulation as a story · 426 points
HN discussionI recommend you read time keeping on the computer systems. Without NTP and some atomic clocks on the network, computers can't keep accurate time themselves. And using a moving window / sun synchronization like that is just brave to put it mildly. [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/keeping-time-on-the-pc/ Also, there was an excellent article about clock drift, but I failed to find it.
Comment linking /keeping-time-on-the-pc/
on “US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent”Submitted I'm Loyal to Nothing Except the Dream as a story · 411 points
HN discussionhttps://blog.codinghorror.com/programming-your-hands/ https://selfcare.tech/
Comment linking /programming-your-hands/
on “Select a muscle and it provides the exercises to workout the selected muscle”Submitted Hacker, Hack Thyself as a story · 306 points
HN discussionSo much this. https://blog.codinghorror.com/they-have-to-be-monsters/
Comment linking /they-have-to-be-monsters/
on “Launch HN: 70MillionJobs (YC S17) – Job board for people with criminal records”Submitted Ten Years of Coding Horror as a story · 264 points
HN discussionFine-grained permissions aren’t useful if an application is going to request access to everything anyway - and non-technical or non-privacy-conscious users will click-through any and all permission prompts so [they can see the dancing bunnies]( https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-dancing-bunnies-problem/ ). In the case of very popular, aggressively-marketed, apps like TikTok and Facebook’s: the lack of easy side-loadi…
Comment linking /the-dancing-bunnies-problem/
on “iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes”Submitted Standard Markdown Is Now Common Markdown as a story · 263 points
HN discussionArray performance isn't always better than string concatenation. In this test case it comes out slower: https://jsperf.com/left-pad-arrays/3 But ultimately it doesn't matter in the least for 99.9% of use cases: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-sad-tragedy-of-micro-optim...
Comment linking /the-sad-tragedy-of-micro-optimization-theater/
on “NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?”Submitted The Rise of the Electric Scooter as a story · 258 points
HN discussionThis should rightfully be on the front-page of HN. I've gone through something almost the same as Dan Abramov here, and I feel it's difficult to impossible to explain this and you have to experience it yourself. The tricky bit is where to draw the line, which I've learned only after pouring thousands of lines of code and I understand is a bit different for everybody. The rule of three[1] was a very useful rule of th…
Comment linking /rule-of-three/
on “Goodbye, Clean Code”Submitted An Inferno on the Head of a Pin as a story · 258 points
HN discussionNot to mention the unrecognized genius trope. In more familiar terms, the “I could do that in a weekend” guy ( https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/amp/ )
Comment linking /code-its-trivial/amp/
on “Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”Submitted What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? as a story · 238 points
HN discussionhttps://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is-fundamental... > If I have learned anything from the Internet, it is this: be very, very careful when you put a number next to someone's name. Because people will do whatever it takes to make that number go up.
Comment linking /because-reading-is-fundamental-2/
on “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds”Submitted The God Login as a story · 219 points
HN discussionThe " This could be built in a week-end " and " Why don't you just [something that only 1/1000 can do and takes so much time] ". See also: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial
Comment linking /code-its-trivial
on “U.S. Accuses Google of Illegally Protecting Monopoly”Submitted If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become? as a story · 212 points
HN discussionNot an uncommon practice, Jeff Atwood calls it "hellbanning": https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/
Comment linking /suspension-ban-or-hellban/
on “I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit”Submitted A 2030 Self-Driving Car Bet as a story · 195 points
HN discussionYes - for those curious, more on MOD from coding horror here: http://blog.codinghorror.com/you-dont-need-millions-of-dolla...
Comment linking /you-dont-need-millions-of-dollars/
on “Facebook acquires Oculus VR”Submitted Stay Gold, America as a story · 194 points
HN discussionLast month I ran into The Principle of Least Power, and it's grabbed me and the more I think about it, the more it expands. I think all of your statements lines up with this principle, except one. Containers are a simpler solution than Operating Systems. Operating Systems is a tightly bound non-simplistic system that breeds complexity, just as you state npm does. Because those interfaces are tightly bound, we were n…
Comment linking /the-principle-of-least-power/
on “Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer”Submitted Zopfli Optimization: Literally Free Bandwidth as a story · 188 points
HN discussion
