Top all-time · #859
Jeremy Bowers
Personal blog · jerf.org · on HN as jerfprogrammingphilosophy
Jeremy Bowers writes iRi, a personal blog at jerf.org about programming and philosophy. Since 2008, 78 different Hacker News readers have linked it 223 times, most often “Suture – Supervisor Trees for Go”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Celebrating Over 10 Years Of Being Too Lazy To Pick A Tagline
Most-linked posts?
- Suture – Supervisor Trees for Go7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2014-09-17
- Sum Types in Go6 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2013-11-28
- Functors and Monads for People Who Have Read Too Many “Tutorials”6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-05-26
- Why I'm Interested in Haskell5 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2012-01-10
- Why Go Getting Generics Will Not Change Idiomatic Go5 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2021-05-05
- Duck typing is safe (2020)4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-06-16
- Goto Is Not a Horror4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-03-18
- The Environment Object Pattern in Go4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-02-07
- The “but on a computer” Fallacy3 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2014-09-21
- Why do we still write insecure software?3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-01-20
What Hacker News says?
I think there's a good chunk of it that's just nerd-sniping. Some it was just a sort of stand-alone complex, too; people started writing monad tutorials because people writing monad tutorials was the thing to do. In the Go community, there was a run for a couple of years of people making stupidly overoptimized HTTP routers, even though there's very few websites where that's actually the problem and even fewer where…
Comment linking /iri/post/2928
on “A half-hour to learn Rust”Submitted Functors and Monads for People Who Have Read Too Many “Tutorials” as a story · 359 points
HN discussionMy counterpoint on why I liked it far more than I thought would going in: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2906 It is amusing though that pretty much everyone agrees that both movies have deep flaws. The disagreement seems to arise in whether the things the movies do uniquely correctly (or at least differently) make up for it. Not exactly a ringing endorsement no matter how you slice it.
Comment linking /iri/post/2906
on “Tron Legacy (2010)”Submitted Some programming language ideas as a story · 253 points
HN discussionFirst, I've already thought about the second-order effects and disagree that the second order effects are that all software vendors in all spaces get wiped out: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/ Second, if "all software vendors in all spaces get wiped out" was going to happen I think we'd be seeing more of it already. Yes, there is support for some software vendors possibly getting wiped out.…
Comment linking /iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/
on “There's never been a better time to go into math (by: 3blue1brown) [video]”Submitted Suture – Supervisor Trees for Go as a story · 149 points
HN discussion"Ultimately I found that visualizing large graphs is rarely helpful in practice; they can certainly look nice for some well defined graphs, but I rarely saw well defined graphs in the wild." Yes, I'm with you: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2025/on_layers_and_boxes_and_lines... Since writing that I'm finding my frustration at the inability of diagrams to link out or be linked into is growing. In hindsight it seems a supe…
Comment linking /iri/post/2025/on_layers_and_boxes_and_lines/
on “Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?”Submitted Layered Design in Go as a story · 141 points
HN discussionspecially with this stuff http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2930 https://github.com/thejerf/suture golang for the win!
Comment linking /iri/post/2930
on “Why Erlang Matters”Submitted The Uselessness of "Fast" and "Slow" in Programming as a story · 117 points
HN discussion"Unlike Rust, Go is really easy to pick up. It's possible to jump directly into it, and you can be writing useful programs after a single afternoon of messing around or reading. On the other hand, while basic Rust is easy to pick up, it takes a while to get used to the borrow checker (and in general understand ownership/borrowing). Additionally, most libraries make full use of advanced features (like associated type…
Comment linking /iri/post/2917
on “A Rust Contributor Tries Their Hand at Go”Submitted Avoiding Reflection (And Such) in Go as a story · 116 points
HN discussionI cite CPython specifically as CPython both to indicate that I mean that specific interpreter, and that I mean Python code, not Python driving other languages. While I fully believe that a Python program with a superior O()-complexity class can beat Java (or, indeed, any language), and that a simpler Python program can hypothetically beat a Java program that is just too complicated, it would also be the case that ta…
Comment linking /iri/post/2024/not_about_python/
on “Using Rust in non-Rust servers to improve performance”Submitted Review: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good as a story · 115 points
HN discussion"I haven't used Erlang but I have done a fair bit of Elixir now." I've programmed in Erlang for somewhere around 6 years. Which really makes things like "I'm not certain you understand what the OTP is giving you" rather silly. [1] You're falling into the exact trap I was talking about, which is implicitly assuming there's some sort of magic sauce that only Erlang brings to you. You also are so busy disagreeing that…
Comment linking /iri/post/2930
on “Managing two million web servers”Submitted Suture – Supervisor Trees for Go as a story · 96 points
HN discussionhttp://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2930 is a really nice blog post from an Erlang programmer attempting to bring supervisor trees to Go as https://github.com/thejerf/suture .
Comment linking /iri/post/2930
on “Eight years of Go”Submitted Why do we still write insecure software? as a story · 64 points
HN discussionOne of the rules of secure programming is that any program that is used in an even remotely security-sensitive context, and anything displaying a Portable Network Graphic is likely to be used in such a context, must be able to specify resource usage limits. In this case that could be dimensions or a limit on the total RAM allowed to be used. Limits need not be hard, either, but could produce a query, for instance, t…
Comment linking /iri/post/2942
on “Biggest image in the smallest space”Submitted Sum Types in Go as a story · 62 points
HN discussionSupervision trees have nothing to do with Actors or CSP. I can recommend reading the original papers. Golang not well supporting supervision trees has more to do with the runtime not allowing to kill a goroutine. See http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2930
Comment linking /iri/post/2930
on “Go's New Brand”Submitted Component Simplicity as a story · 58 points
HN discussionIt's your living room, but on a computer! http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2916 (Expect to see the Virtual World idea that prompted that post pop up again for VR, too. Expect it not to work any better this time.) It's cute but it's just demoware. Once the novelty wears off, the usual thing to do will be the "void theater". That's our subjective perception of a good movie anyhow, that the entire rest of the room is gone.
Comment linking /iri/post/2916
on “John Carmack on Developing the Netflix App for Oculus”Submitted Duck typing is safe (2020) as a story · 58 points
HN discussion"This begs the question: why aren’t language and library designers stealing the structure behind Erlang’s behaviours, rather than copying the ideas of lightweight processes and message passing?" Because the function signatures of Erlang's behaviors are critically tied to Erlang's other functionality, specifically its unusual use of immutability. You need a separate init call for its servers because of that, and a ve…
Comment linking /iri/post/2930/
on “Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing (2023)”Submitted Functional Programming Lessons Conclusion as a story · 52 points
HN discussionOn the flip side of your point, I find myself taking weird positions on issues of what should be in curricula. It seems to me that most people carry around a mental model of schooling such that schools just pour knowledge onto a hard drive that then retains it for the rest of that person's life. But this doesn't stand up under 5 minute's examination if you look around in the world. All those polls about how 60% of $…
Comment linking /iri/post/2943
on “The Rule of 72 (2007)”Submitted Goto Is Not a Horror as a story · 51 points
HN discussionNot if the provider implements delegation properly. The identity string returned should be http://jerf.org in this case. The catch, however, is that many providers screw the identity up. For example I set up a page at http://foo.com with necessary headers to delegate to my Google Account. Using the OpenID support on App Engine, I get the federated identity as http://foo.com/openid?id=[SOME RANDOM DIGITS] instead. Th…
Comment linking /
on “Open ID Is A Nightmare”Submitted Function Arguments Are Not Function Colors as a story · 45 points
HN discussion
