Top all-time · #79
Salvatore Sanfilippo
Personal blog · antirez.com/news · on HN as antirezprogrammingsystemsdata
Salvatore Sanfilippo writes <antirez>, a personal blog at antirez.com about programming, systems and data. Since 2007, 425 different Hacker News readers have linked it 611 times, most often “Tcl the Misunderstood (2006)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN links antirez's blog for Redis history and licensing, security warnings, HyperLogLog, and his views on LLM coding. Commenters call several posts excellent, amazing or worth reading.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Called 'amazing', 'excellent' and 'always worth reading'; 'one of the few good discourses'; 'strongly recommended'; a favourite.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Tcl the Misunderstood (2006)28 people · 41 mentions · first linked 2007-05-06
- Writing system software: code comments19 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2018-10-06
- Redis new data structure: the HyperLogLog16 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2014-04-01
- On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)15 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2018-09-06
- Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2017-02-28
- Redis will remain BSD licensed12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2018-08-22
- A few things about Redis security11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2015-11-03
- The End of the Redis Adventure11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2020-06-30
- English has been my pain for 15 years10 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2013-09-02
- An update about Redis developments in 201910 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-02-20
What Hacker News says?
I am reminded of Antirez's experience on being pushed to rename the master/slave terminology in Redis: http://antirez.com/news/122 > I believe that political correctness has a puritan root. As such it focuses on formalities, but actually it has a real root of prejudice against others. For instance Mark bullied me because I was not complying with his ideas, showing problems at accepting differences in the way people…
Comment linking /news/122
on “GitHub, fuck your name change”Submitted The End of the Redis Adventure as a story · 2282 points
HN discussionI will never go along with that farce, especially when I learned that a bunch of people bullied Antirez for years in order to force him to change the language in Redis. http://antirez.com/news/122 It serves absolutely no purpose, other than for a group of people to feel like they have an ideological hold on the IT industry. Some of these people are already coming with new lists of "forbidden words" they are trying t…
Comment linking /news/122
on “GitHub, fuck your name change”Submitted Redis is open source again as a story · 1896 points
HN discussionHe shared some of his struggles a while ago: http://antirez.com/news/129 Great work @antirez! Thanks for your dedication. Stepping back as maintainer and giving your support from the Redis Labs advisory board is nothing less than what you did so far. It's sensible that you don't want to make plans about the rest of your time right now. Cheers
Comment linking /news/129
on “The End of the Redis Adventure”Submitted From where I left as a story · 1190 points
HN discussionWhen Antirez left Redis, he wrote an amazing blog post I go back to often [0]. In there he said: "I write code in order to express myself, and I consider what I code an artifact, rather than just something useful to get things done. I would say that what I write is useful just as a side effect, but my first goal is to make something that is, in some way, beautiful. In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad a…
Comment linking /news/133
on “Redis is open source again”Submitted We are destroying software as a story · 1012 points
HN discussionThis is ridiculous. Software should be built in the best method of delivering maximum value to its users. A trade-off for usability can be made for certain cases like ease-of-use for new software. Redis was part of this a while ago http://antirez.com/news/96 . Engineers should know their tools before using them. It's a huge part of our jobs. You could introduce a ton of other vulnerabilities in software: XSS, SQL in…
Comment linking /news/96
on “Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak”Submitted Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity as a story · 782 points
HN discussionYou likely enjoy this read too: http://antirez.com/news/75 On the HyperLogLog algorithm to count things.
Comment linking /news/75
on “H.264 is Magic”Submitted The struggles of an open source maintainer as a story · 719 points
HN discussionWell in this case, antirez literally promised[1] they wouldn't change the license of the core away from BSD, and then Redis Labs did just that, and now antirez is speaking favorably of that decision. [1]: https://antirez.com/news/120
Comment linking /news/120
on “From where I left”Submitted Side projects as a story · 698 points
HN discussionPerhaps. I've seen people seen/write all kind of stuff when serious money are involved, and I also was offered to just just that on number of occasions. I appreciate your honesty in disclosing what you still have Redis Labs stock, and assuming it is anything reasonable their value at future IPO would be much larger than any cash compensation which you might be getting as the part of the deal. Reality is you did not…
Comment linking /news/120
on “From where I left”Submitted Redis 6.0 GA as a story · 680 points
HN discussionIME good commenting alleviates a lot of the “problems” with using complex language features. I’m thinking redis style comments (see here[0] for antirez’s philosophy on the issue). If you’re doing something that’s not immediately obvious, explain what you’re doing! That way others can verify it during review, and when someone is reading the code later they can read the comment to understand what’s happening rather th…
Comment linking /news/124
on “Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer”Submitted Human coders are still better than LLMs as a story · 655 points
HN discussionantirez has written publicly, only a few weeks ago[0], about their experience working with LLMs. Partial quote: > And now, at the end of 2024, I’m finally seeing incredible results in the field, things that looked like sci-fi a few years ago are now possible: Claude AI is my reasoning / editor / coding partner lately. I’m able to accomplish a lot more than I was able to do in the past. I often do more work because o…
Comment linking /news/144
on “Things we learned about LLMs in 2024”Submitted In defense of linked lists as a story · 603 points
HN discussionNot updated on a daily basis, but always worth reading: http://antirez.com/ https://danluu.com/ http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/ https://rachelbythebay.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are some good technology blogs to follow?”Submitted Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update as a story · 600 points
HN discussionSome examples of prompt exchanges that seem representative: https://claude-workerd-transcript.pages.dev/oauth-provider-t... ("Total cost: $6.45")! https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/commit/... https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/commit/... The first transcript includes the cost, would be interesting to know the ballpark of total Claude spend on this library so far. -- This is oppor…
Comment linking /news/144
on “Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts”Submitted Streams: a new general purpose data structure in Redis as a story · 588 points
HN discussionThere's actually a writeup of this technique on the Redis blog: http://antirez.com/news/96 In my case they overwrote ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, /etc/group and /etc/passwd as well.
Comment linking /news/96
on “Redis Turns 10 – How it started with a single post on Hacker News”Submitted Writing an editor in less than 1000 lines of code, just for fun as a story · 535 points
HN discussionI would strongly recommend that you read the author of Redis himself discussing this issue: http://antirez.com/news/122
Comment linking /news/122
on “Redis Turns 10 – How it started with a single post on Hacker News”Submitted Redis cluster, no longer vaporware as a story · 522 points
HN discussionToo much to not mention: davidw, antirez, and Richard Hipp (SQLite) are all current or former heavy hitters in the Tcl world. David contributed to the second ed. of Tcl and the Tk Toolkit[0], co-authored Rivet[1] (an Apache httpd Tcl module), among other things. antirez wrote Tcl the Misunderstood[2] and Jim[3], a lighter weight Tcl implementation, and Richard (drh) is a former Tcl Core Team member[4] who describes…
Comment linking /articoli/tclmisunderstood.html
on “Redis Turns 10 – How it started with a single post on Hacker News”Submitted AI is different as a story · 499 points
HN discussion
