Top all-time · #1802
Simon Hørup Eskildsen
Personal blog · sirupsen.com · on HN as Sirupsenprogrammingsystems
Simon Hørup Eskildsen writes Simon Eskildsen, a personal blog at sirupsen.com about programming and systems. Since 2010, 40 different Hacker News readers have linked it 56 times, most often “Napkin Problem 14: Using checksums to verify syncing 100M database records”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2024-11-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Simon Eskildsen's sirupsen.com, mainly for the Napkin Math newsletter of back-of-the-envelope estimation problems, plus posts on performance, databases, and Ruby setup.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Described as thoroughly enjoyed and as an awesome newsletter; one commenter says an RVM setup article changed their life.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal website and blog of Simon Hørup Eskildsen about napkin math, computers, books, ideas, and whatever else interests me.
Most-linked posts?
- /napkin/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-02-10
- Napkin Problem 14: Using checksums to verify syncing 100M database records3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-01-03
- Careful Trading Complexity for 'Improvements'3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-30
- Adjacent Possible: Peeking into the Future3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-05-16
- My journey to the International Olympiad in Informatics2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-06-25
- Scaling Causal's Spreadsheet Engine: From Maps to Arrays2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-07-06
- Using checksums to verify syncing 100M database records2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-03-09
- Shitlist Driven Development (2016)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-15
- Increase HTTP performance by fitting in the initial TCP slow start window2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-07-29
- Get started right with RVM2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-09-13
What Hacker News says?
Great comment! I was inspired by this article https://every.to/superorganizers/how-to-build-a-learning-mac... about Simon Eskildsen, which led me to his blog https://sirupsen.com/ , which then led me to create https://juliusrobert.site for myself. It's not a traditional blog per se but it checks some boxes and I have the same quote as you do here as a reason to do this https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog…
Comment linking /
on “Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?”Submitted Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production as a story · 502 points
HN discussion* https://sirupsen.com/napkin/problem-15 * https://www.cdnplanet.com/blog/initcwnd-settings-major-cdn-p...
Comment linking /napkin/problem-15
on “A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)”Submitted Shitlist Driven Development (2016) as a story · 404 points
HN discussionGlad to see this company get more funding. Last year I ported all of our companys excel and access files over to airtable. Currently tweaking with their API to work with a MS-SQL database using amazon Lambda and RDS at the moment. Their API documentation is fantastic, some of the best I've seen as well. They even have some of the best case studies for workflow management as well, posted on their blog, for setting up…
Comment linking /minimum-viable-airtable/
on “Airtable gets $52M in funding”Submitted Neural network from scratch as a story · 208 points
HN discussionThis reminds me of this idea of "Minium Viable Airtable" that I think is apt: https://sirupsen.com/minimum-viable-airtable
Comment linking /minimum-viable-airtable
on “I only use Google Sheets”Submitted MySQL transactions per second vs. fsyncs per second (2020) as a story · 121 points
HN discussionI read this as napkin math[1] for Kube and thoroughly enjoyed. You can only find the important numbers relative to performance and scaling by trying to accomplish some kind of goal. Benchmarks are mostly bikeshedding. [1]: https://sirupsen.com/napkin
Comment linking /napkin
on “K8s with 1M nodes”Submitted Increase HTTP performance by fitting in the initial TCP slow start window as a story · 102 points
HN discussionI’ve been fascinated by the 'napkin math' topic recently, but felt a need for a way to routinely practise. It’s an acquired skill once it’s effortless to do the order of magnitude calculations in a meeting, or zipping through possible solutions on a whiteboard (what I imagine Jeff Dean does). Will it be fast enough? How much will it cost? Does the benchmarked performance match the order of magnitude we’d expect? To…
Comment linking /napkin/
on “Memory Bandwidth Napkin Math”Submitted Why I'm glad my iPhone broke as a story · 91 points
HN discussionSimon Eskildsen has a monthly newsletter called Napkin Math[0] entirely dedicated to practicing practical real-world Fermi problems like these. [0] - https://sirupsen.com/napkin/
Comment linking /napkin/
on “Back of the envelope estimation hacks”Submitted Get started right with RVM as a story · 69 points
HN discussionGreat questions, I struggled with this part the most when I was learning it. `.grad` is set by `autograd` when calling `backward()` Probably the easiest way to understand this is to play a bit with `.grad` and `backward()` on their own, with the first code sample in the `autograd` section [1]. [1]: https://sirupsen.com/napkin/neural-net#automagically-computi...
Comment linking /napkin/neural-net
on “Neural network from scratch”Submitted Multitasking makes you dumb as a story · 59 points
HN discussionThere's a monthly newsletter dedicated to napkin math. He hasn't made one in a few months for some reason, but judging from his tweets he's working on a new one. You can also practice on the old ones of course. https://sirupsen.com/napkin/
Comment linking /napkin/
on “Habits of Expert Software Designers (2019)”Submitted Setting up Unicorn with Nginx as a story · 56 points
HN discussionSimon from Shopify has this awesome newsletter to talk about some of these things. https://sirupsen.com/napkin/problem-14-using-checksums-to-ve...
Comment linking /napkin/problem-14-using-checksums-to-verify/
on “System Design Interview book review”Submitted When to Write a Simulator (2021) as a story · 52 points
HN discussionTake bricestacey's advice, use RVM. I was in the same boat as you when getting started with Ruby - it seemed like I was always fighting with gems and other dependencies - "there has to be a better way!", I thought. And there was... I read this article[1] and it changed my life. [1] http://sirupsen.com/get-started-right-with-rvm/
Comment linking /get-started-right-with-rvm/
on “Web development is just broken”Submitted My journey to the International Olympiad in Informatics as a story · 46 points
HN discussionserver/client data sync example problem : https://sirupsen.com/napkin/problem-9
Comment linking /napkin/problem-9
on “How to Check 2 SQL Tables Are the Same”Submitted 30 days of super productivity as a story · 31 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scaling Causal's Spreadsheet Engine: From Maps to Arrays as a story · 22 points
HN discussionSubmitted Paperless with Evernote as a story · 18 points
HN discussionSubmitted Handle passwords with Keychain as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stop relying on your ORM and learn SQL as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted Shitlist Driven Development (2016) as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Is max MySQL transactions per second = max fsyncs per second? as a story · 10 points
HN discussion
