Top all-time · #4074
Jonathon Belotti
Personal blog · thundergolfer.comprogrammingsystems
Jonathon Belotti's personal blog at thundergolfer.com covers programming and systems. Since 2019, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 52 times, most often “Computers Are Fast (2024)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jonathon Belotti's writing for its history of large language models, drawing on his own NLP research experience, and for essays on programming and how code quality has changed.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
No hugs, some learning
Most-linked posts?
- Computers Are Fast (2024)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2024-07-08
- The First LLM5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-03-24
- A brief history of our serverless future3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-10-28
- How to Ask for Help in Slack2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-02-25
- More than DNS: Learnings from the 14 hour AWS outage2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-10-27
- Beyond 'latency numbers every programmer should know'2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-01-19
What Hacker News says?
You can send them https://thundergolfer.com/communication/slack/2021/02/24/how... . I used to get a "the worker is having a bad time" daily, but my other main pet peeve was screenshotting error messages and stacktraces.
Comment linking /communication/slack/2021/02/24/how-to-ask-for-help-in-slack/
on “How to communicate effectively as a developer”Submitted More than DNS: Learnings from the 14 hour AWS outage as a story · 176 points
HN discussionLast year wrote a technical writing advice checklist for engineers called How to ask for help in Slack : https://thundergolfer.com/communication/slack/2021/02/24/how... . I was at Canva, a fast growing company adding 500 engineers a year, and the tenured engineers were getting hit with a lot of questions and help requests. I thought about this list a lot, and believe that maintaining adherence to all 10 checklist it…
Comment linking /communication/slack/2021/02/24/how-to-ask-for-help-in-slack/
on “How to communicate effectively as a developer”Submitted The First LLM as a story · 16 points
HN discussionThis is rule 7 of 10 in my post 'How to Ask for help in Slack'[1] 1. I have ‘rubber duck debugged’ my own question. 2. I checked that this question hasn’t been asked before. 3. I have noted in my message what I’ve tried. 4. I have avoided the ‘XY problem’ by clearly detailing the core problem, X. 5. I have provided specifics of my issue, not vague references or descriptions. 6. I have provided URL links to relevant…
Comment linking /communication/slack/2021/02/24/how-to-ask-for-help-in-slack/
on “I hate screenshots of text”Submitted The First LLM as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThis is quite a good overview, and parts reflect well how things played out in language model research. It's certainly true that language models and deep learning were not considered particularly promising in NLP, which frustrated me greatly at the time since I knew otherwise! However the article misses the first two LLMs entirely. Radford cited CoVE, ELMo, and ULMFiT as the inspirations for GPT. ULMFiT (my paper wi…
Comment linking /blog/the-first-llm
on “A History of Large Language Models”Submitted A brief history of our serverless future as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThis is the central claim of E.D Hirsch's Why Knowledge Matters [1] book on educational reform. Hirsch is perhaps best known for coining the term "cultural literacy" in his book of the same name. A little while back I wrote about cultural literacy in the software industry, following the lead of Hirsch's book.[2] 1. https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9781612509525/why-knowledge-matt... 2. https://thundergolfer.com/software/…
Comment linking /software/culture/2024/01/14/computing-cultural-literacy/
on “Teaching general problem-solving skills is not a substitute for teaching math [pdf] (2010)”Submitted Put down the K8s cluster, your pipelines can run without it as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> Yeah, let's remember everything that was great about 25 years ago and forget everything that sucked. Juxtapose it with everything that sucks about today but omit everything that's great. Come on man. That's fair. When I see bad code today, and try to explain to myself what's bad about it, I realize that people totally did the same things 25 years ago. Nowadays there is just so much more code, and we stand on talle…
Comment linking /computers-are-fast
on “Programming peaked”Submitted More Than DNS: The 14 hour AWS us-east-1 outage as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> they will use in in anger when they want to get their personal projects running. At that point it becomes the defacto standard and we can escape snowflake-build madness. I hold to a very similar sentiment. I sold Bazel on my blog like this: > Our builds will be pure functions from source to deployable. This will represent a durable evolution the software engineering field, and Bazel will become as essential as git…
Comment linking /build-systems/software-engineering/bazel/2021/06/14/bazel-is-taking-over/
on “I cannot write software outside of Google anymore”Submitted Larval stage support engineering: great at what doesn't scale as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAfter hearing Will MacAskill talk about how he lives his life in accordance to his ethics he quickly became a personal hero of mine, and he certainly influenced me to start donating. My tax-year-end donation in 2019 was at the time my biggest, as I'd completed my 1st year of full-time employment. Hovering on the donate button I definitely felt large reservations as my brain made all sorts of excuses not to send away…
Comment linking /charity/politics/effective-altruism/2019/07/01/current-thoughts-on-effective-altruism/
on “5k people have pledged to give 10%+ of their income to effective charities”Submitted Gray's '5 minute rule' in the cloud era as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThey say they use LangChain, so it's going to be structurally similar to this MVP side-project: https://thundergolfer.com/infinite-ama . That's a chat-bot backed by LangChain and OpenAI, which can answer some questions from my knowledge base. It's WIP, I want to add my HN comments into the mix, but the code is here: https://github.com/thundergolfer/modal-fun/tree/main/infinit...
Comment linking /infinite-ama
on “Show HN: IngestAI – NoCode ChatGPT-bot creator from your knowledge base in Slack”Submitted Aussie Engineers, Get to the States as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://thundergolfer.com/blog/ My site is one of those 'do it quick, don't ever rewrite it' ones. It's still Jekyll, has a bunch of raw HTML and JS embedded in posts, but doesn't get in the way of actually publishing. I'm reasonably happy with it now. I wish the library section ( https://thundergolfer.com/library/ ) was auto-updated from Goodreads, and wish I had a proper Javascript solution, but realistically I'm…
Comment linking /library/
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted Have Private Evals as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://thundergolfer.com My site’s content is most heavily focused on books, ML infra, and small projects. My most popular stuff is probably the Designing Data Intensive Apps flashcards mini-project and a post about K8s being a misfit for data/ML platform teams.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share Your Personal Site”Submitted Computers Are Fast as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA lot of people here are commenting that if you have to care about specific latency numbers in Python you should just use another language. I disagree. A lot of important and large codebases were grown and maintained in Python (Instagram, Dropbox, OpenAI) and it's damn useful to know how to reason your way out of a Python performance problem when you inevitably hit one without dropping out into another language, whi…
Comment linking /computers-are-fast
on “Python Numbers Every Programmer Should Know”Submitted Computers Are Fast as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYes there’s a bug: https://thundergolfer.com/performance/profiling/2022/08/05/s...
Comment linking /performance/profiling/2022/08/05/stringio-bytes-written-per-second/
on “Do You Know How Much Your Computer Can Do in a Second?”Submitted Computers Are Fast as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Computers Are Fast (2024) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Wonderful LLMs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Computers Are Fast (2004) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The best software podcast episodes I ever heard as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
