Top all-time · #650
Karl Seguin
Personal blog · openmymind.net · on HN as latchprogrammingweb
Karl Seguin's personal blog at openmymind.net covers programming and web. Since 2008, 96 different Hacker News readers have linked it 212 times, most often “The Little Go Book”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 30 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Karl Seguin's posts and his Little books (Go, MongoDB, Redis) as practical introductions, especially for Zig and Go.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Called a good explanation and interesting; the Little MongoDB and Redis books are excellent, quick reads.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 30 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Programming blog exploring Zig, Elixir, Go, Testing, Design and Performance
Most-linked posts?
- The Little Go Book5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-10-21
- Zig Interfaces5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-10-08
- I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-08-22
- The Little Redis Book4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-01-23
- Learning Zig4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-09-08
- Switching on Strings in Zig4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-02-14
- Dependency Injection in Golang3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-09-18
- Writing a Task Scheduler in Zig3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-09
- Client-Side vs Server-Side Rendering3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-06-01
- Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Go3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-03-11
What Hacker News says?
I was specifically responding to the statement "Zig and rust do not have the same scope. I honestly do not think they should be compared". I don't know enough Zig to have a qualified opinion on the particular example (besides being very surprised it compiled). However, I thought this post from the front page the other day had more practical and thoughtful examples of this kind of thing: https://www.openmymind.net/Im…
Comment linking /Im-Too-Dumb-For-Zigs-New-IO-Interface/
on “Unexpected productivity boost of Rust”Submitted Website search hurts my feelings as a story · 367 points
HN discussionThanks. I also have a history with tests and I continue to struggle to find the right balance not just between coverage, but also unit vs integration (and within unit, between behavioural and implementation). I think this uncertainty based on experience is in a whole other class than "I can't get my employees to write tests." Two quick points. 1 - I've added fuzz testing to my arsenal and find it a good value, espec…
Comment linking /A-Decade-Of-Unit-Testing/
on “What I wish I knew when I became CTO”Submitted Redis: Zero to Master in 30 minutes as a story · 252 points
HN discussionAn interesting and somewhat related article called “How Unreliable is UDP?”: https://www.openmymind.net/How-Unreliable-Is-UDP/ . Discussion from four years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8465956 .
Comment linking /How-Unreliable-Is-UDP/
on “HTTP-over-QUIC will officially become HTTP/3”Submitted Zig's (.{}){} Syntax as a story · 245 points
HN discussionthere's lots of old HN threads and a blog and a couple books to give you the flavor (and yeah some people are less than enthusiastic); also Oreilly and Manning are coming out soon with "In Action" books, you can read a 8 of 14 chapters draft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8332835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8356677 http://blog.senko.net/learning-go _________ Books: http://golangbootcamp.com/ http://o…
Comment linking /The-Little-Go-Book/
on “Go 1.4 is released”Submitted Why I Dislike EC2 as a story · 238 points
HN discussionThe C Programming Language had a tremendous influence on me. Everything I've written has been with the hope that I might capture part of its magic. That said, maybe The Little Go Book ( http://openmymind.net/The-Little-Go-Book/ ) can tide you over until summer.
Comment linking /The-Little-Go-Book/
on “The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan Donovan”Submitted Zig's new LinkedList API (it's time to learn fieldParentPtr) as a story · 227 points
HN discussionAnother shameless plug. I'm pretty proud of my Learning Zig series (1). It's been translated into Chinese, Russian and Korean. Some may know my other writings (e.g. Little Go/Redis/MongoDB Book). I don't feel like I captured Zig quite as well, but it's hopefully a useful resources especially if you're coming from a garbage collected language. (1) https://www.openmymind.net/learning_zig/
Comment linking /learning_zig/
on “Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023”Submitted How Unreliable is UDP? as a story · 221 points
HN discussionYou can. Instead of passing null through the chain you could pass an actual error object. Check out Elixir With statements for example: http://openmymind.net/Elixirs-With-Statement/ We do something similar in ruby with deterministic gem. Each action returns Success(value) or Failure(error). The error object is one of our own defined error instances (e.g. Responses::Unauthorized.new(msg)). These are then translated t…
Comment linking /Elixirs-With-Statement/
on “Escaping Hell with Monads (2017)”Submitted I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface as a story · 206 points
HN discussionThe 2nd Edition of the MongoDB: The Definitive Guide from O'Reilly is one I can recommend (full disclosure: I was a technical reviewer on that edition). http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028031.do For basics, the Little MongoDB Book ( http://openmymind.net/2011/3/28/The-Little-MongoDB-Book/ ) is a bit dated at this stage, but a good starting point. Finally, there are free MongoDB courses available at http://edu…
Comment linking /2011/3/28/The-Little-MongoDB-Book/
on “MongoDB Raises $150 Million at $1.2 Billion Valuation”Submitted Leveraging Zig's Allocators as a story · 193 points
HN discussionDirect link to part 2: http://openmymind.net/2011/11/8/Redis-Zero-To-Master-In-30-M...
Comment linking /2011/11/8/Redis-Zero-To-Master-In-30-Minutes-Part-2/
on “Redis: Zero to Master in 30 minutes”Submitted You Really Should Log Client-Side Errors as a story · 177 points
HN discussionIf you control every implementation (ie you aren’t writing a library where others will implement your interfaces), then tagged unions are a simple way to accomplish this. See the bottom of this page: https://www.openmymind.net/Zig-Interfaces/
Comment linking /Zig-Interfaces/
on “Zig's (.{}){} Syntax”Submitted Migrating to CockroachDB as a story · 163 points
HN discussionI don't know about the deinit thing, but I think this allocator/writer stuff has nothing to do with "inside language creators' perspective". To me, even though it wouldn't be my first guess as someone who's never used Zig, it does make sense to me that it's done this way since apparently Zig does not really have interfaces or traits of any kind for structs to just have. In fact when Googling about Zig interfaces I f…
Comment linking /Zig-Interfaces/
on “Zig's (.{}){} Syntax”Submitted The Little MongoDB Book available on GitHub as a story · 147 points
HN discussionThis is a good explanation https://www.openmymind.net/Zig-Interfaces/
Comment linking /Zig-Interfaces/
on “Zig's (.{}){} Syntax”Submitted The Little Redis Book as a story · 146 points
HN discussionNot the author, but guessing: https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/33k8sp/gos_error_ha... https://www.openmymind.net/Golangs-Error-Handling-Good-And-B...
Comment linking /Golangs-Error-Handling-Good-And-Bad/
on “Go Modules in 2019”Submitted In Zig, what's a writer? as a story · 140 points
HN discussion> Why the heck is Go making me care about pointers at all if it is a GC’d language? Apparently, the author doesn't understand how pointers work in Golang. He should read this article: http://openmymind.net/Things-I-Wish-Someone-Had-Told-Me-Abou... . In short, golang pointer is neither c pointer nor java reference.
Comment linking /Things-I-Wish-Someone-Had-Told-Me-About-Go/
on “A year with Go”Submitted Is Zig's new writer unsafe? as a story · 138 points
HN discussionIt's a pretty old book that I'm not sure people should still be reading, let alone pay for. But, if you want promotion, you could always read The Little MongoDB Book ( http://openmymind.net/2011/3/28/The-Little-MongoDB-Book ) it's also free though....(and I'm constantly keeping an eye on Amazon for it now).
Comment linking /2011/3/28/The-Little-MongoDB-Book
on “Ask HN: Help, I think Amazon is stealing my ebook”Submitted Paypal's logo designed to look like a recommendation? as a story · 131 points
HN discussion
