Top all-time · #11760
Joel Gustafson
Personal blog · joelgustafson.com/posts · on HN as joelgprogrammingmath
Joel Gustafson's personal blog at joelgustafson.com covers programming and math. Since 2016, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 24 times, most often “Merklizing the key/value store for fun and profit”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Joel Gustafson's posts on CRDT performance and Merkle-based sync, the Canvas framework, and interactive cellular automata pages. Commenters point to them as references and favourites.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Joel Gustafson
Most-linked posts?
- Merklizing the key/value store for fun and profit2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-05-05
- Introduction to Causal Logs – Joel Gustafson2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-10-02
What Hacker News says?
There is an extension for Chrome called Visual History: https://joelgustafson.com/projects/visual-history/ or Histree: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/histree/lngppkkhji... or Tree History: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-history/kfgne... or Brancher: https://brancher.io/
Comment linking /projects/visual-history/
on “Refresh: concept for a new kind of web browser”Submitted Visualizing 13M Bluesky users as a story · 261 points
HN discussionI think blockchains are overkill because they're trying to get a global consensus about every transaction in the world, which is very expensive (with electricity, stake etc.). They're trying to solve the additional problem of preventing "forking" of a history. Whereas if you allow forks then CRDTs are more lightweight. Internet Computer canisters, Merkle DAGs (like IOTA), Hashgraphs and Holochains are probably a bet…
Comment linking /posts/2023-05-04/merklizing-the-key-value-store-for-fun-and-profit
on “Faster CRDTs (2021)”Submitted Syntax highlighting on the web as a story · 50 points
HN discussionCan someone explain to me please why CRDTs are slow? This article suggests the future to me: https://joelgustafson.com/posts/2023-05-04/merklizing-the-ke... Take a look at this and compare it to Y.js or automerge: https://github.com/canvasxyz/okra-js
Comment linking /posts/2023-05-04/merklizing-the-key-value-store-for-fun-and-profit
on “Faster CRDTs (2021)”Submitted Spatio-temporal indexing the Bluesky firehose as a story · 46 points
HN discussionIt’s part of his higher-level framework called Canvas. Check this out: https://joelgustafson.com/posts/2024-09-30/introduction-to-c... And this: https://github.com/canvasxyz/canvas
Comment linking /posts/2024-09-30/introduction-to-causal-logs
on “Every System is a Log: Avoiding coordination in distributed applications”Submitted Elementary Cellular Automata as a story · 40 points
HN discussionI think there's a subtle danger to "cognitive outsourcing", or at least an important distinction to be aware of. "Cognitive outsourcing" works like an oracle, but many of our best tools work more like bicycles: very direct, very fluid, very analog, with continuous feedback that helps us build an constructive intuition. Bicycles extend the range of what a human can do; oracles do something that a human tells them to…
Comment linking /ideas/2016/08/25/oracles-and-bicycles.html
on “Thought as a Technology”Submitted Elementary Cellular Automata as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSimple. Use the principles I said above, for distributed and asynchronous systems. The SQL server should have a way to do pubsub. It can then notify your PHP webhook via HTTP, or run a script on the command line, when a row changes. It should have an interface to subscribe to these changes. If your SQL data store lacks the ability to notify others that a row changed, then there’s your main problem. Add that function…
Comment linking /posts/2023-05-04/merklizing-the-key-value-store-for-fun-and-profit
on “Caching is an abstraction, not an optimization”Submitted One-dimensional Cellular Automata as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMy fav: http://joelgustafson.com/things/automata/?73
Comment linking /things/automata/?73
on “Elementary Cellular Automata”Submitted Show HN: Ozymandias, an MIT Scheme environment for the browser as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnecdote: When I was in high school, I was really bored in class on day, and I started writing out the trinomial triangle modulo 2; I was curious as to whether or not it followed a similar pattern to Pascal's triangle modulo 2. Lo and behold, what emerged was Rule 150: http://joelgustafson.com/things/automata/?150 If you are wondering, this is the trinomial triangle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinomial_triangle
Comment linking /things/automata/?150
on “Elementary Cellular Automata”Submitted Oracles and Bicycles as a story · 3 points
HN discussionit’s definitely not an exact solution, but i’ve been thinking about ways prolly trees could fit into CRDT systems. they essentially give you efficient peer-to-peer entry-wise diffs, so could be good for identifying conflicts after-the-fact. but if you store operations in a prolly tree, you end up hashing them all (plus logarithmic additional space overhead), so it might be a non-starter. i have a blog post to shill…
Comment linking /posts/2023-05-04/merklizing-the-key-value-store-for-fun-and-profit
on “Ask HN: What is new in Algorithms / Data Structures these days?”Submitted Introduction to Causal Logs – Joel Gustafson as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted HTML Transclusions with WebComponents and HTML Imports as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Notes on Computation: Languages, Lisp, and the Art of New Ideas as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Merklizing the key/value store for fun and profit as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Merklizing the key/value store for fun and profit as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A ten-minute introduction to the Y Combinator as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted One-dimensional Cellular Automata as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
