Top all-time · #3035
Russell Cohen
Personal blog · rcoh.me/posts · on HN as rusbusprogrammingsystems
Russell Cohen's personal blog at rcoh.me covers programming and systems. Since 2013, 25 different Hacker News readers have linked it 59 times, most often “Why writing a linked list in safe Rust is so damned hard”. The last post was in 2019, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog mainly for its post on why doubly linked lists are nearly impossible in safe Rust. Other linked posts cover cache-oblivious data structures, verifiable voting and linear-time median finding.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Russell Cohen's Blog and Website
Most-linked posts?
- Why writing a linked list in safe Rust is so damned hard7 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-02-21
- An Introduction to Cache-Oblivious Data Structures6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-02-06
- Why you can have millions of goroutines but only thousands of Java threads5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-04-16
- My Favorite Algorithm: Linear Time Median Finding (2018)5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-01-18
- Thoughts on Rust, a few thousand lines in2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-31
- Sudo Science2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-16
- Thoughts on Rust, a few thousand lines in2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-04-05
- An Analysis of Hash Map Implementations in Popular Languages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-01-04
What Hacker News says?
You're not the only one having trouble writing basic data structures in safe Rust: [1] [1] https://rcoh.me/posts/rust-linked-list-basically-impossible/
Comment linking /posts/rust-linked-list-basically-impossible/
on “Go 2, here we come”Submitted My Favorite Algorithm: Linear Time Median Finding (2018) as a story · 371 points
HN discussionHave you tried writing a doubly linked list? https://rcoh.me/posts/rust-linked-list-basically-impossible/
Comment linking /posts/rust-linked-list-basically-impossible/
on “Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?”Submitted Why you can have millions of goroutines but only thousands of Java threads as a story · 281 points
HN discussionI think the Rust people are de-emphasizing the importance of linked lists due to the glaring hole in the Rust language that makes it difficult to implement linked lists, and horribly awkward to do doubly-linked lists in safe Rust (See https://rcoh.me/posts/rust-linked-list-basically-impossible/ ) To save face, the Rust astroturfers are now skipping around saying "Linked lists aren't important"
Comment linking /posts/rust-linked-list-basically-impossible/
on “In defense of linked lists”Submitted Thoughts on Rust, a few thousand lines in as a story · 228 points
HN discussionAn intro here: https://rcoh.me/posts/cache-oblivious-datastructures/
Comment linking /posts/cache-oblivious-datastructures/
on “Algorithms Behind Modern Storage Systems”Submitted An Introduction to Cache-Oblivious Data Structures as a story · 218 points
HN discussionOne thing to keep in mind with Postgres is that unique key indices can lead to deadlock and stall other transactions that insert the same key.[1] I wouldn't say "unique constraints considered harmful" but I would definitely say they can be surprising and must be used with care. [1]: https://rcoh.me/posts/postgres-unique-constraints-deadlock/
Comment linking /posts/postgres-unique-constraints-deadlock/
on “SQL Keys in Depth”Submitted Why writing a linked list in safe Rust is so damned hard as a story · 202 points
HN discussionHugo plus Netlify is perfect. Did that recently. Pushing to GitHub deploys. There's a link to the source in the footer: https://rcoh.me
Comment linking /
on “Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog”Submitted Postgres indexes under the hood as a story · 162 points
HN discussionFirst off, thank you for all of the work you've put into Rust! I think the challenge that you face is that if the problem is CS101 courses, then Rust will always be unfamiliar to the majority of practicing professionals. Cyclic/recursive datastructures are common in web services, where one needs to model bidirectional relationships ( just think of friends on a social graph ). As well as several primitive datastructu…
Comment linking /posts/rust-linked-list-basically-impossible/
on “Rust Starter Kit 2020”Submitted Verifiable Voting: A Primer as a story · 74 points
HN discussionGC is only part of the issue. Value types allow much finer control over locality, something completely lacking in Java now. And without that, you give up a lot of performance. For example: https://rcoh.me/posts/cache-oblivious-datastructures/
Comment linking /posts/cache-oblivious-datastructures/
on “Java 12”Submitted Why writing a linked list in Rusts is basically impossible as a story · 16 points
HN discussionGoroutines are not threads: https://rcoh.me/posts/why-you-can-have-a-million-go-routines...
Comment linking /posts/why-you-can-have-a-million-go-routines-but-only-1000-java-threads/
on “Memory usage of a toy C# server and client with 500K concurrent connections on”Submitted Thoughts on Rust, a few thousand lines in as a story · 15 points
HN discussionIf you are hashing fixed-size keys, then tabulation hashing is simple and fast with good theoretical properties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulation_hashing http://rcoh.me/pyhash.pdf
Comment linking /pyhash.pdf
on “Which hashing algorithm is best for uniqueness and speed?”Submitted Thoughts on Rust, a few thousand lines in as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI really want to like Rust. But writing a doubly linked list was already shown to be difficult [1], and now closures are too ... It really feels like this is not a language to "get things done". Please let someone prove me wrong. [1] https://rcoh.me/posts/rust-linked-list-basically-impossible/
Comment linking /posts/rust-linked-list-basically-impossible/
on “Why Rust closures are somewhat hard”Submitted Things Learned from a Thousand Lines of Rust as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSEEKING WORK: Bay Area (Redwood City) and Remote - Scala, Java, Go, ES6/React/Redux - http://rcoh.me , https://www.github.com/rcoh
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (June 2016)”Submitted Why Writing a doubly linked list in (safe) Rust is So Damned Hard as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSEEKING WORK | Remote or Boston | https://rcoh.me | rcoh@rcoh.me I do everything, but specialize in backend infrastructure. - Rust, Python, Go, Scala, Java, Python, C/C++ I also do devopsy things (Ansible, Terraform, etc.) I have a lot of experience running Kubernetes clusters and porting infrastructure to k8s.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (March 2020)”Submitted An Introduction to Cache-Oblivious Data Structures as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis sounds like the method from the Rivest, 2006 paper: https://rcoh.me/posts/verifiable-voting-primer/#fn:triple
Comment linking /posts/verifiable-voting-primer/
on “Verifiable Voting: A Primer”Submitted How to do a good code review as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt occurred to be that with 2 factor authentication, the server needs to hold on the the secret key. If that is leaked, the 2 factor is useless.[1] Contrast this with salted hashing where leaking the hash doesn't directly lead to compromise. Could you use a blind signature to construct a rotating code 2 factor scheme where leaking the server credential doesn't lead to complete compromise? https://rcoh.me/posts/two-f…
Comment linking /posts/two-factor-auth
on “Blind Signature”Submitted Why you can have millions of Goroutines but only thousands of Java Threads as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
