Top all-time · #263
Send More Paramedics
Personal blog · blog.fogus.me · on HN as fogusprogrammingphilosophy
Send More Paramedics is a personal blog at blog.fogus.me about programming and philosophy. Since 2008, 185 different Hacker News readers have linked it 377 times, most often “Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Michael Fogus's blog for its Clojure and Lisp writing, reading and idea-list posts, and its end-of-year 'best things and stuff' lists. Commenters point to specific posts such as the 100:10:1 method, Lisp book lists and the ClojureScript post.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Comments say the 100:10:1 take is loved, a ClojureScript post is pretty good, and the lists are nice or worth checking out.
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?
- Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)12 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2011-09-09
- The German School of Lisp (2011)9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2011-05-03
- The 100:10:1 method: my approach to open source9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2015-11-04
- Baysick: A Scala DSL Implementing BASIC (2009)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2009-03-26
- Clojure’s :pre and :post6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2009-12-21
- Perlis Languages6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2011-08-14
- Compiling Clojure to javascript pt 15 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-07-21
- Understanding the Clojure -> macro4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-03-04
- Programming Language Development: The Past 5 Years4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-10-19
- Six works of Computer Science-Fiction (2015)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-04-27
What Hacker News says?
I used to be in this position. Your question really resonates with me. I think I have broken the cycle, but it is hard to be sure of something like this of course. I have certainly been able to make more progress on projects than I have been able to in the past. I think this has helped me: - Make a Someday/Maybe list. Capture your ideas and put them on the list. This can just be a text file. Feel free to add impleme…
Comment linking /2015/11/04/the-100101-method-my-approach-to-open-source/
on “Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?”Submitted Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice) as a story · 467 points
HN discussion- X4 · 2013-04-09
Summary of the links shared here: http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-macronomicon-597023... http://blog.fogus.me/2011/11/15/the-macronomicon-slides/ http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/linguistics-turing-complete... http://businessofsoftware.org/2010/06/don-norman-at-business... http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012... http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-R... http://e…
Comment linking /2011/11/15/the-macronomicon-slides/
on “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?” Submitted Best things and stuff of 2015 as a story · 451 points
HN discussionThis worked for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JXhJyTo5V8 Slides: http://blog.fogus.me/2011/11/15/the-macronomicon-slides/ http://www.slideshare.net/fogus/the-macronomicon-10171952
Comment linking /2011/11/15/the-macronomicon-slides/
on “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?”Submitted Six works of Computer Science-Fiction (2015) as a story · 371 points
HN discussionSimply keeping a list of ideas has made a huge difference for me. Instead of feeling distracted by an idea when I should be focusing on something else, storing it somewhere means I can come back to it. Reviewing the idea list inspires me and gives me something to do when I'm bored. Finding articles or papers related to an idea, or capturing random thoughts about it is as easy as dumping it in a folder (eg in Dropbox…
Comment linking /2015/11/04/the-100101-method-my-approach-to-open-source/
on “How to Take Smart Notes”Submitted Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read at Least Twice (2011) as a story · 366 points
HN discussionThe switch to C and C++ only came when Apple decided to cater to the increasing UNIX market pressure. Which was actually C++, given that they tried to port MacApp to C++. While at the same time Metrowerks, which was the major compiler vendor on the Mac, introduced PowerPlant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacApp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPlant https://archive.org/stream/ApplePascalHistoryDTC92/ApplePasc...…
Comment linking /2017/07/20/pascal-at-apple/
on “Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1 Source Code (2013)”Submitted The best things and stuff of 2014 as a story · 314 points
HN discussionCrap, I still have a tab open in my browser at home for the best things and stuff of 2013[1] that I haven't made it though, and I first opened it when it was posted in late 2013! I really need to devote some time to that, since I've bothered to make sure that tab survived for two years. 1: http://blog.fogus.me/2013/12/27/the-best-things-and-stuff-of...
Comment linking /2013/12/27/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2013/
on “Best things and stuff of 2015”Submitted Programming Language Development: The Past 5 Years as a story · 284 points
HN discussionBlogs/websites in no particular order: * http://blog.codinghorror.com/ (Jeff Atwood) * http://www.catonmat.net/ (Pete Krumins) * http://blog.fogus.me/ (Mike Fogus) * http://research.swtch.com/ (Russ Cox) * http://effbot.org/ (Fred Lundh) * http://adam.herokuapp.com/ (Adam Wiggins) Podcasts in no particular order: * http://www.dotnetrocks.com/ (NET Rocks) * http://herdingcode.com/ (NET focused podcast with Scott Alle…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What tech blogs, podcasts do you follow outside of HN?”Submitted The Best Things and Stuff of 2021 as a story · 262 points
HN discussionThe Idea is that the transactor does a very small amount of work an does can scale much better then other "single point bottelneck". The problem is still there but smaller that way. Read the comment here, it gives some information on the problem your discribing: http://blog.fogus.me/2012/03/05/datomic/
Comment linking /2012/03/05/datomic/
on “Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com”Submitted Fogus: Things and Stuff of 2024 as a story · 259 points
HN discussionYeah, it looks like I got that part wrong. (I intentionally skimmed over the transactor, because I was avoiding "how" issues and because my understanding of it wasn't that clear.) The transactor is involved in just writes, not reads. (So that helps.) It's not distributed and cannot be distributed, in this system, because it ensures consistency, so yes, it is potentially a bottleneck. In blog comments by Rich Hickey[…
Comment linking /2012/03/05/datomic/comment-page-1/
on “Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com”Submitted The best things and stuff of 2013 as a story · 259 points
HN discussionNice little find in the comments of a blog. Rich Hickey himself speakes about some of the things people probebly care about http://blog.fogus.me/2012/03/05/datomic/ .
Comment linking /2012/03/05/datomic/
on “Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com”Submitted The 100:10:1 method: my approach to open source as a story · 256 points
HN discussionOne question I have is the cold start problem. How can I ensure dropping in a new peer is not going to have a large negative effect on response times? With memcache, you can just prewarm a new node or have clients only round-robin it a few times per request to warm it up. It seems like pre-warming here is going to be more cumbersome since it's not a simple k-v store but will require you to pre-emptively run queries…
Comment linking /2012/03/05/datomic/comment-page-1/
on “Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com”Submitted Perlis Languages as a story · 236 points
HN discussionI'd say it's pretty good, http://blog.fogus.me/2011/07/21/compiling-clojure-to-javascr...
Comment linking /2011/07/21/compiling-clojure-to-javascript-pt1/
on “ClojureScript”Submitted Soup – Alan Kay on Objects as a story · 212 points
HN discussionI love Clojure, and I use it in every project where I have control over the technology, but I do agree with the points raised by Ashton Kemerling. Clojure is beautiful, and backed by beautiful theories, but its implementation needs to be clean or it will eventually develop enough special cases that its beauty will be ruined. In some sense, you could say this is what happened to Ruby, though there the allowance of "s…
Comment linking /2011/05/03/the-german-school-of-lisp-2/
on “My Increasing Frustration with Clojure”Submitted Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice) as a story · 198 points
HN discussionAuthor here. The announcement with some preliminaries can be found at http://blog.fogus.me/2013/09/09/read-eval-print-%CE%BBove-v0... Enjoy.
Comment linking /2013/09/09/read-eval-print-%CE%BBove-v001-sakura/
on “(λove (print (eval (read))))”Submitted Lisp in 32 lines of Ruby as a story · 194 points
HN discussionThis isn't a blog per se. See: http://blog.fogus.me/2013/09/09/read-eval-print-%CE%BBove-v0...
Comment linking /2013/09/09/read-eval-print-%CE%BBove-v001-sakura/
on “(λove (print (eval (read))))”Submitted Some Lisp books (2012) as a story · 192 points
HN discussion
