Top all-time · #1576
samwho.dev
Personal blog · samwho.dev · on HN as samwhoprogrammingwriting
samwho.dev is a personal blog at samwho.dev about programming and writing. Since 2020, 44 different Hacker News readers have linked it 58 times, most often “Load Balancing, Visualized”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (17) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Sam Rose's independent site of interactive, visual explanations of topics such as reservoir sampling, Bloom filters, load balancing, memory allocation and Turing machines. It is valued for its visualisations.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 17 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I write visual and interactive guides to programming topics.
Most-linked posts?
- Load Balancing, Visualized10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2023-04-10
- Hashing4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-06-20
- A visual introduction to big O notation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-23
- Memory Allocation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-05-11
- A visual interactive guide to Bloom filters3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-02-20
- /2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-09-02
- Latency numbers every programmer should know2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-03-17
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-23
- Load Balancing (2023)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-01-08
- A Logical Way to Split Long Lines (2019)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-04-21
What Hacker News says?
I love the commissioned art! Found this post with more details: https://samwho.dev/dogs/
Comment linking /dogs/
on “Reservoir Sampling”Submitted A visual introduction to big O notation as a story · 691 points
HN discussionLooks like it - https://samwho.dev/rss.xml
Comment linking /rss.xml
on “Reservoir Sampling”Submitted Reservoir Sampling as a story · 532 points
HN discussionhttps://samwho.dev has some fantastic blog posts with great visualisations
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?”Submitted A visual interactive guide to Bloom filters as a story · 286 points
HN discussionhttps://samwho.dev/blog/ The visualizations help with the understanding while keeping it engaging too
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023”Submitted Latency numbers every programmer should know as a story · 237 points
HN discussionSam has a long history of building beautiful visual explanations like this - I didn't realize he works for ngrok now, here's his previous independent collection: https://samwho.dev/
Comment linking /
on “Prompt caching for cheaper LLM tokens”Submitted Turing Machines as a story · 115 points
HN discussionLove the detailed interactive visual explanations, https://samwho.dev/ is another one like Ciechanow.ski
Comment linking /
on “Physically based rendering from first principles”Submitted Big O as a story · 14 points
HN discussionI really like this husky graphic, did you create it? https://samwho.dev/images/sage-warning.png
Comment linking /images/sage-warning.png
on “A visual interactive guide to Bloom filters”Submitted A visual, interactive guide to bloom filters as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYou might want to check out this very nice article on reservoir sampling, which discusses its application to logging: https://samwho.dev/reservoir-sampling/
Comment linking /reservoir-sampling/
on “Log by time, not by count”Submitted Bloom Filters as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSam Rose has also written a great article on Bloom Filters and has some great animations to help illustrate it too. Definitely worth checking out https://samwho.dev/bloom-filters/
Comment linking /bloom-filters/
on “Bloom Filters”Submitted Big O as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHere's a Turing machine that uses finite space but infinite time: https://samwho.dev/christopher/?code=H4sIAAAAAAAAE8tNzMxTqFH... (from Sam Rose's wonderful article on Turing machines [1]) Your last point is correct, though: if you can detect a "cycle" (like the one the Turing machine I linked to goes through) then you can conclude that the machine won't halt. [1] https://samwho.dev/turing-machines/
Comment linking /turing-machines/
on “Gödel's theorem debunks the most important AI myth – Roger Penrose [video]”Submitted Ping Samwho as a story · 4 points
HN discussion[40 minutes into the talk]: Looks like the study scanned 3.6 million github issues across 1.7 million repositories and looked for the number of bugs that were TypeError, AttributeError, or NameError and found it was 2.7% of issues. I'm not a fan of this kind of methodology, because there are so many different use cases for github issue tracker (including feature requests, documentation requests, etc.) that I think t…
Comment linking /blog/move-your-bugs-to-the-left/
on “Pyre: A performant type-checker for Python 3”Submitted Bloom Filters as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI have some potentially bad news for you: https://samwho.dev/load-balancing https://encore.dev/blog/queueing
Comment linking /load-balancing
on “I ported Kubernetes to the browser”Submitted Hashing as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI‘m at https://nik.digital :) Some others: https://samwho.dev https://www.nicchan.me
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”Submitted Load Balancing, Visualized as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://samwho.dev/ (e.g. Reservoir sampling, Load balancing) https://imadr.me/pbr/ (physically based rendering)
Comment linking /
on “Lights and Shadows”Submitted Latency numbers every programmer should know as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt’s just plain JS, you can see it here: https://samwho.dev/js/load-balancers.js Just like the good old days :)
Comment linking /js/load-balancers.js
on “Load Balancing”Submitted Getting an Autism Diagnosis as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
