Top all-time · #1465
Ruud van Asseldonk
Personal blog · ruudvanasseldonk.comprogramming
Ruud van Asseldonk's personal blog at ruudvanasseldonk.com covers programming. Since 2014, 48 different Hacker News readers have linked it 85 times, most often “YAML document from hell (2023)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 38 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ruud van Asseldonk's blog for posts on YAML's pitfalls, LLM-written text, and configuration and type-system design. Commenters cite the YAML post as a reference on YAML problems.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Good summary and nice overview of YAML problems; a favourite site; agreed with on LLM text; a thoughtful article.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 38 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- YAML document from hell (2023)16 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2023-01-12
- Zero Cost Abstractions5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-11-30
- Neither necessary nor sufficient4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-10-06
- Build System Insights4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-09-04
- Abstraction, not syntax4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-10-12
- On benchmarking3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-07-09
- Model facts, not your problem domain3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-06-11
- Exceptional results: error handling in C# and Rust2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-06-17
- A type system for RCL (2024)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-19
- A language for designing slides2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-07-11
What Hacker News says?
> YAML whitespace is cursed YAML itself is cursed: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr...
Comment linking /2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell
on “Google flags Immich sites as dangerous”Submitted Please put units in names as a story · 1284 points
HN discussionBy now I consider LLM text a double insult. It says “I couldn’t be bothered to spend time writing this myself,” yet it makes _me_ waste time reading through the generated fluff! I agree with the article, I'd rather read the prompt. https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2025/llm-interactions
Comment linking /2025/llm-interactions
on “I'd rather read the prompt”Submitted Zero Cost Abstractions as a story · 366 points
HN discussionHi Napolux, It looks like your site is using a theme based on my website ( https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/ , source at https://github.com/ruuda/blog ). That is fine — it is open source after all, licensed under the GPLv3. But I can’t find the source code for your site, and I can’t find any prominent notices saying that you modified my source. Could you please add those?
Comment linking /
on “A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website”Submitted YAML document from hell (2023) as a story · 239 points
HN discussion[This] site is my favorite in this regard: [This][ https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/ ]
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?”Submitted A reasonable configuration language as a story · 141 points
HN discussionTo me YAML seems like the CoffeeScript of JSON, and unlike CoffeeScript I don’t understand why people are still using it. I guess XML and JSON are too verbose. But YAML is so far in the opposite direction, we get the same surprise conversions we’ve had in Excel ( https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr... ). Why is “on” a boolean literal (of course so are “true”, “false”, as well as “yes”, “no”,…
Comment linking /2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell
on “Why are we templating YAML? (2019)”Submitted Abstraction, not syntax as a story · 102 points
HN discussionSeconding the sibling, YAML may look nice but it's absolutely full of awful confusing behavior. If you don't like JSON for human-written stuff, see TOML or the like. I think JSON is great for serialization, it's so simple, but I agree we need something more readable like TOML for human-written data. https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr...
Comment linking /2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell
on “The Bun Shell”Submitted Exceptional results: error handling in C# and Rust as a story · 83 points
HN discussionNo, it's not fine at config. It's a bag of weird corner cases and incompatible revisions which you have to debug instead of doing your actual work. Here's a good summary: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr...
Comment linking /2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell
on “Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers”Submitted A type system for RCL, part 2: The type system as a story · 30 points
HN discussionI wholeheartedly agree, I wrote about this at https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2025/llm-interactions .
Comment linking /2025/llm-interactions
on “We're losing our voice to LLMs”Submitted A float walks into a gradual type system as a story · 29 points
HN discussionhttps://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2016/11/30/zero-cost-abstractio...
Comment linking /2016/11/30/zero-cost-abstractions
on “Next Iteration of “The Rust Programming Language” Book”Submitted One year with Colemak as a story · 24 points
HN discussionI think that prospect (of programmatically structurally editing markdown files) would have made everyone burst out in laughter in 2000; if you want to programmatically alter stuff, put it into sexp's or some other syntax. SGML. Apparently human readable but really a tricky format leads to this sort of thing: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr...
Comment linking /2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell
on “Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown”Submitted Writing a path tracer in Rust, part 7: conclusion as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThere are underpowered languages / tools, that can only solve a problem for which they are intended poorly. But not all limited tools are like that. Say, eBPF is prominently not Turing-complete, which allows to guarantee that a eBPF program terminates, and even how soon. Still eBPF is hugely useful in its area. Or, say, regular expressions are limited to regular languages; in particular, they famously [1] cannot pro…
Comment linking /2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell
on “Is htmx Just Another JavaScript Framework?”Submitted Neither necessary nor sufficient as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI don't really understand why people would want a GC over deterministic destruction like in Rust. GC is [neither necessary nor sufficient]( https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2015/10/06/neither-necessary-no... ). Ownership model in practice is much more convenient precisely because objects can act like resources and implement their cleanup logic, and the business logic can rely on it. It's a great improvement in any imper…
Comment linking /2015/10/06/neither-necessary-nor-sufficient
on “Four Years of Rust”Submitted A type system for RCL (2024) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHere's a good example, fresh off of the first result from Google: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2016/11/30/zero-cost-abstractio...
Comment linking /2016/11/30/zero-cost-abstractions
on “Rust is more than safety”Submitted The YAML Document from Hell as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI have a blog where I post a few posts per year. [1] /feed.xml is served with an Expires header of 24 hours. I wrote a tool that allows me to query the webserver logs using SQLite [2]. Over the past 90 days, these are the top 10 requesters grouped by ip address (remote_addr column redacted here): requests_per_day user_agent 283 Reeder/5050001 CFNetwork/1568.300.101 Darwin/24.2.0 274 CommaFeed/4.4.0 (https://github.c…
Comment linking /writing
on “Feed readers which don't take "no" for an answer”Submitted The YAML Document from Hell as a story · 5 points
HN discussionRelated (from recent posts on HN): https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2025/abstraction-not-syntax I really like the idea of color representing scope and relatedness, rather than syntax.
Comment linking /2025/abstraction-not-syntax
on “Getting syntax highlighting wrong”Submitted Model facts, not your problem domain as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
