Top all-time · #2461
Kevin Sookocheff
Personal blog · sookocheff.com/postprogrammingsystemscareer
Kevin Sookocheff's personal blog at sookocheff.com covers programming, systems and career. Since 2014, 31 different Hacker News readers have linked it 91 times, most often “Bulk Generating Cloze Deletions for Learning a Language with Anki (2017)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (16) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kevin Sookocheff's posts on queue and message-processing tradeoffs (SQS FIFO), database internals (C-Store), and generating Anki cloze cards for language learning.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 16 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Kevin Sookocheff’s Personal Blog
Most-linked posts?
- Bulk Generating Cloze Deletions for Learning a Language with Anki (2017)4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-12-20
- The Zero Bug Policy4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-04-03
- Dissecting SQS FIFO Queues: Does Ordered and Exactly Once Messaging Really Exist3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-08-01
- Choosing a Hypermedia Type for Your API HAL, JSON-LD, Collection+JSON, Siren3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-02-18
- On choosing a hypermedia type for your API (2014)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-02-02
- A Guide to the Kubernetes Networking Model2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-07-11
- How hard could be to setup Neovim for Java development?!2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-12-15
- Why Java? Tales from a Python Convet2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-08
- Kafka in a Nutshell2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-02-21
- The 5 Stages of NoSQL2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-09-20
What Hacker News says?
> Are you saying that this is bad? It doesn't seem so. It's not "bad" per se, but it's not what it seems on the surface. ACKing a message doesn't mean that the message will not be received more than one time. As long as the smarts for recognizing recycled messages are embedded in the application logic, all will be fine. Here's a good explanation written about SQS, but applies to all message technologies that work ba…
Comment linking /post/messaging/dissecting-sqs-fifo-queues/
on “Message DB: Event Store and Message Store for PostgreSQL”Submitted How Does NTP (Network Time Protocol) Work? as a story · 124 points
HN discussion> The almost-but-not-quite unstated major premise of the whole argument is that you're putting a key piece of smarts into the queue: Tracking whether a message has been processed. One could argue that that is the real antipattern. Indeed. Lots of good writing on the tradeoffs, for example: https://sookocheff.com/post/messaging/dissecting-sqs-fifo-qu... At the risk of beating the point to death, the transition from S…
Comment linking /post/messaging/dissecting-sqs-fifo-queues/
on “Message DB: Event Store and Message Store for PostgreSQL”Submitted Kafka in a Nutshell as a story · 78 points
HN discussionI used only pre-"built" decks and got to C1 in Spanish. One was actually prebuilt, the other was literally algorithmically generated disposable clozes. That, one graded reader and comic books got me to being comfortable in an L1->L1 dictionary, and then it's over. You don't need language learning material any more, just material. People are just repeating this advice about making your own decks, and it's based in no…
Comment linking /post/language/bulk-generating-cloze-deletions-for-learning-a-language-with-anki/
on “Learning Persian with Anki, ChatGPT and YouTube”Submitted Why Java? Tales from a Python Convert as a story · 75 points
HN discussionNice one! Good on you for building a thing and putting it out there. A few comments/suggestions: * You have DEBUG = True in your production Django config. (eg. http://deckofcardsapi.com/api/ ) * You are mutating state with HTTP GET, this is an anti-pattern for a number of reasons. The common one I use with people I coach is that browsers/proxies will happily cache GET requests unless told not to, but there are a num…
Comment linking /posts/2014-03-11-on-choosing-a-hypermedia-format/
on “Show HN: Deck of Cards – A playing card API”Submitted Concurrency: A Primer as a story · 42 points
HN discussion“The performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers” Software connection: this is known as SLA Inversion [1], the phenomena that you can never be more reliable than your least reliable component. There are ways to get around it, but they involve having multiple redundant but independent paths to achieving a successful result. This is difficult for str…
Comment linking /post/architecture/stability-antipatterns/
on “Updates on Grounding of Boeing 737 MAX 9 Aircraft”Submitted Metrics-Driven Development as a story · 41 points
HN discussionConsider the following lambda calculus expression: ((λ x . ((x x) (x x))) (λ x . ((x x) (x x)))) Under β-reduction, this blows up: doubling with every reduction, never repeating itself, growing infinitely long. Let's name this expression "BlowsUp". Recall that the Church encoding for "false" is "(λ x . (λ y . y))". Recall that this acts like an "if/else" statement, taking two arguments and always returning the secon…
Comment linking /post/fp/evaluating-lambda-expressions/
on “Timeline for Logic, λ-Calculus, and Programming Language Theory (2012) [pdf]”Submitted The 5 Stages of NoSQL as a story · 33 points
HN discussionFor a long time, json-schema was stuck at draft-04, and it looks like in the last few months under new authorship it's up to draft-07. The mapping of these names to IETF RFC revisions is more complicated, and explained on the site [1]. Json-schema is useful for describing JSON data structures in JSON, so you can bring a codegen and generate corresponding structures in your language, or perform some payload validatio…
Comment linking /post/api/on-choosing-a-hypermedia-format/
on “JSON Schema”Submitted The Five Stages of NoSQL as a story · 6 points
HN discussionDistributed SQL data warehouses? Start with the papers: - C-Store (column-oriented database storage and processing): http://db.lcs.mit.edu/projects/cstore/vldb.pdf and https://sookocheff.com/post/databases/c-store/ - BigQuery (the original Dremel-based query engine): https://cloud.google.com/files/BigQueryTechnicalWP.pdf - Snowflake paper: https://www.snowflake.com/resource/sigmod-2016-paper-snowfla... - Andy Pavlo'…
Comment linking /post/databases/c-store/
on “Apache Druid vs. Time-Series Databases”Submitted A Guide to the Kubernetes Networking Model as a story · 5 points
HN discussionFor anyone interested I posted a review of the Data Science Specialization that I paid for and completed: http://sookocheff.com/post/datascience/datasciencespecializa...
Comment linking /post/datascience/datasciencespecialization/
on “Ask HN: Is it worth paying for a Coursera course?”Submitted A Primer on Concurrency as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHonestly there are so many tangentials in this post that it's really quite hard to get through without losing track of what's what, or what's real and what's hypothetical. The article mentions network delay filtering algorithms that fall in broad categories x and y, but doesn't mention what NTP actually uses (linking to some pdf presentation elsewhere). Then there's a section about clock selection (which I understan…
Comment linking /post/time/how-does-ntp-work/assets/ntp-pll.png
on “How Does NTP (Network Time Protocol) Work?”Submitted How hard could be to setup Neovim for Java development?! as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'm using Feedly. Checking it once a couple of weeks and happy about my flow. Here are the blogs that I follow: - https://jvns.ca/atom.xml - http://rachelbythebay.com/w/atom.xml - https://blog.kowalczyk.info/atom.xml - https://ashfurrow.com/feed.xml - https://sneak.berlin/feed.xml - https://sookocheff.com/index.xml - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/feed/rss - https://zachholman.com/atom.xml - https://www.wezm.net/v2/…
Comment linking /index.xml
on “Ask HN: Do you maintain a list of RSS links of GOAT blogs?”Submitted How Does NTP Work? as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> It doesn't but it also will not create a different sentence to you to practice a word. Anki doesn't create either words or sentences. Drilling words doesn't work. You've drilled words and found it doesn't work. Try using clozes. It is not "less efficient" than drilling words, because drilling words does not work. No word in French means anything in English. The meanings of words are just surveys of the contexts in…
Comment linking /post/language/bulk-generating-cloze-deletions-for-learning-a-language-with-anki/
on “A Love Letter to Flashcards”Submitted Why Java? Tales from a Python Convert as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://sookocheff.com/
Comment linking /
on “Any recommendation for good engineering blogs”Submitted Why Java? Tales from a Python Convet as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNote that the blog post about autogenerating Anki cards linked in the second answer ( https://sookocheff.com/post/language/bulk-generating-cloze-d... ) uses Tatoeba ( https://tatoeba.org ) as the data source, which is also where Clozemaster gets its sentences from. You already said that those are bad for learning English, so Tatoeba may not be the solution for you. But that depends on what exactly you think is wrong…
Comment linking /post/language/bulk-generating-cloze-deletions-for-learning-a-language-with-anki/
on “Ask HN: How to Perfect Your English”Submitted Choosing a Hypermedia Type for Your API HAL, JSON-LD, Collection+JSON, Siren as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis is known as a zero bug policy [1]. I've had decent success implementing it with my team. The main advantages are: - Prioritizing is hard, so avoid wasting brain cycles deciding how important your bugs are - It encourages all of your team to get things right the first time, because if they don't they know they will be going back to fix it immediately. - If you want to create a culture of quality then it's an obv…
Comment linking /post/process/zero-bug-policy/
on “Ask HN: What would happen if we prioritised all bugs over all new features?”Submitted A Guide to the Kubernetes Networking Model as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
