Top all-time · #2480
plasmasturm.org
Personal blog · plasmasturm.org/logprogrammingwriting
plasmasturm.org is a personal blog at plasmasturm.org about programming and writing. Since 2007, 29 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times, most often “The Six Stages of Debugging (2012)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this personal site mainly for the 'Six Stages of Debugging' piece, which is cited as a joke in bug threads, and for a rename utility page and a few programming notes.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Six Stages of Debugging (2012)7 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2012-04-18
- The urge to comment as a sign of danger2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2007-08-20
- /code/rename/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-07-10
What Hacker News says?
There actually seem to be people whose default mode of operation seems to lie entirely in that zone though. I'm pretty sure everyone arrives at a similar conclusion if they realise that attempts to fix a certain person's code always end in a express trip to the 6th stage of debugging [1]... [1]: http://plasmasturm.org/log/6debug/
Comment linking /log/6debug/
on “Why PS4 downloads are so slow”Submitted Tree traversal without recursion: the tree as a state machine (2007) as a story · 209 points
HN discussionReminds me of the "Six Stages of Debugging": http://plasmasturm.org/log/6debug/
Comment linking /log/6debug/
on “This should never happen”Submitted The Six Stages of Debugging (2012) as a story · 112 points
HN discussionhttp://plasmasturm.org/log/6debug/ Stage 2.
Comment linking /log/6debug/
on “Windows gets a new terminal”Submitted In praise of git’s index as a story · 93 points
HN discussionSix Stages of Debugging 1. That can’t happen. 2. That doesn’t happen on my machine. 3. That shouldn’t happen. 4. Why does that happen? 5. Oh, I see. 6. How did that ever work? http://plasmasturm.org/log/6debug/
Comment linking /log/6debug/
on “There are only four billion floats, so test them all (2014)”Submitted The urge to comment as a sign of danger as a story · 21 points
HN discussionTry this rename script if you really want to profit: http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/ The -z flag is phenomenal. The only thing I wish it had was a -R for recursive.
Comment linking /code/rename/
on “Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours”Submitted Paul Graham's kind of dirty (On Unicode support as an exercise for the programmer) as a story · 17 points
HN discussion1. That can't happen 2. That doesn't happen on my machine. 3. That shouldn't happen. 4. What does that happen? 5. Oh, I see. 6. How did that ever work? Stage six is the worst. Especially when I wrote the original code. ( http://plasmasturm.org/log/6debug/ )
Comment linking /log/6debug/
on “What is a coder's worst nightmare? (2014)”Submitted Good Mail Sorting as a story · 15 points
HN discussionI've got so many :( I haven't seen this one so far (but haven't yet read all comments): Whenever possible, try to avoid bugs. But, even more importantly: When given a bug report, FIX the damn bug. Don't: - Shrug, mutter incomprehensible things and wish the person with the bug report goes away (yes, I've seen that. It infuriates me.) - Say "that's not possible" (cf [1]). It is. It happened, no user makes this stuff u…
Comment linking /log/6debug/
on “Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?”Submitted A graphic illustration of 0.999…=1 as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI use this `rename` (available from Homebrew as `rename`): http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/
Comment linking /code/rename/
on “Interesting commands for the Linux shell”Submitted Yet another reason not to bet on Apple as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAlso, something like this should work for network sound :) http://plasmasturm.org/log/soundserverhack/
Comment linking /log/soundserverhack/
on “Linus: “I no longer feel like I can trust ‘init’ to do the sane thing””Submitted Three Gigahertz Forever as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDifferent programming environments enforce security to different degrees, with different defaults. I'll here post some of the many criticisms that have been aimed at PHP over the years: Andrew van der Stock writes: -------------- For some time, I’ve been worried about the direction of PHP. As many of you know, I helped write XMB Forum and now help write UltimaBB. XMB in particular is an old code base, and UltimaBB,…
Comment linking /log/393/
on “Free Wordpress themes coming with a price”Submitted Caveat Commentor (2007) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFrom the article: "I no longer think about code lines as an asset to be accumulated, but rather as an expenditure to be avoided." The obvious Edsger Djikstra reference: [I]f we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as “lines produced” but as “lines spent”: the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger. http://plasmasturm.org/log/linesspent/
Comment linking /log/linesspent/
on “Going Fast Slowly”Submitted Six Stages of Debugging (2012) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI had forgotten about this site and am pleased to get a reminder. Its the place I first saw the immortal quote: A friend of mine in a compiler writing class produced a compiler with one error message “you lied to me when you told me this was a program”. —Pete Fenelon http://plasmasturm.org/code/
Comment linking /code/
on “The Six Stages of Debugging (2012)”Submitted Write just enough as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI use rename[1] to clean up problematic filenames. Sadly I have to rename it to `rnm` because there is a namespace conflict with rename.pl in util-linux. On OSX it is as easy as `brew install rename.` I do not know why it has never made it into the debian. Taking care of a directory full of madness is as easy as `rename -z`: -z, --sanitize Replaces consecutive blanks, shell meta characters, and control characters in…
Comment linking /code/rename
on “Fixing Unix Filenames: Control Characters, Leading Dashes, and Other Problems”Submitted An orphan olive branch to Mercurial (named branches in git) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> It’s guaranteed she was pressing the gas, 0% chance she was pressing the brake Congratulations, you reached stage 1 of debugging! http://plasmasturm.org/log/6debug/
Comment linking /log/6debug/
on “Why Level-3 Autonomy is a major milestone in self-driving cars”Submitted Duh: A shell one-liner courtesy of GNU as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGian, If you want to argue that functional programming is better than object-oriented programming, you should take an object-oriented program, show how you would rewrite it as a functional program, show us why the result is better, and then show how the defects in the OO program are unavoidable within OO. Some aspects of "goodness" for programs are: * Brevity. * Whether the program does something useful or at least…
Comment linking /log/340/
on “I laugh at your puny human 'objects'”Submitted Three Evolutionary Stages of Version Control as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
