Top all-time · #4334
Steve Bennett
Personal blog · stevebennett.meprogrammingdata
Steve Bennett's personal blog at stevebennett.me covers programming and data. Since 2014, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “Things I hate about Git (2012)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Steve Bennett's blog for his 2012 critique of Git's user interface, plus posts on his Whenever explorer of films and books by historical setting, cycling route maps, and procedural generation.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
...about maps, open data, Git, and other tech.
Most-linked posts?
- Things I hate about Git (2012)14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2016-04-27
- 10 things I hate about Git2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-11-13
What Hacker News says?
I think you are seeing it as a software developer as opposed to (say) a biologist on the first year of their PhD who just wants to keep their scripts safe. Mercurial's strong point (IMO) was to cater to the 90% of developers who work with two-to-three colleagues on a single branch - you could always make things more complex if needed (as evidenced by Firefox doing just fine), but the defaults were always more user-f…
Comment linking /2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git/
on “Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo”Submitted Things I hate about Git (2012) as a story · 68 points
HN discussionYou are basically right. But your framing might be slightly off. The primary advantage in vector tiles for whoever is providing the map is not the small benefits of greater sharpness or flexibility in styling. It's the vast decrease in compute required. Maintaining the infrastructure to generate up to date raster tiles is a pretty serious undertaking. I once spent a lot of time developing this very detailed style fo…
Comment linking /2015/01/14/cycletour-org-a-better-map-for-australian-cycle-tours/
on “OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles”Submitted Things I hate about Git (2012) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://whenever.world/ It's an explorable database of films, TV shows, books and board games based around their historical setting: where and when the thing is set. It's been incredibly complex and interesting getting the (messy) data, making sense of it and trying to design a UI to explore it. https://stevebennett.me/2025/08/26/whenever-exploring-times-...
Comment linking /2025/08/26/whenever-exploring-times-and-places-in-film-and-books/
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)”Submitted Things I hate about Git as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis distinction between branches and bookmarks looks like one of the things missing the most from git. Grab a random branch from some place and try to guess whether the committer intends to rewrite it in the future or not: good luck. For the rest: https://stevebennett.me/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-gi...
Comment linking /2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git/
on “Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source”Submitted Things I hate about Git (2012) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMy one-person side project, Whenever: https://stevebennett.me/2025/08/26/whenever-exploring-times-... In short, an explorable database of movies, TV shows, books and board games organised around the time and place that they're set. So if you're interested in stuff set during the French Revolution but not in Paris, you could find it there, for instance.
Comment linking /2025/08/26/whenever-exploring-times-and-places-in-film-and-books/
on “Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)”Submitted 10 things I hate about Git as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI have put enormous effort into building routable cycling maps over the years: https://stevebennett.me/2015/01/14/cycletour-org-a-better-ma... It's frustrating to me that after all these years, I still end up using Google Maps mostly. I haven't really come across a general purpose mapping tool I can use for cycling directions and routing, both on desktop and on my phone, in cities and in the bush.
Comment linking /2015/01/14/cycletour-org-a-better-map-for-australian-cycle-tours/
on “Should this be a map or 500 maps?”Submitted Things I hate about Git as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is a good article: https://stevebennett.me/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-gi... > Once you understand Git's data model, the UI is perfectly intuitive So it's not intuitive at all. Not to mention that every damn command is inconsistent with every other command! To remove a file, git rm. To remove a branch, git branch -D. To remove a commit, git reset --hard HEAD^. How is this intuitive, consistent, or even sa…
Comment linking /2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git/
on “Git Undo”Submitted 10 things I hate about Git as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's from 2012, and some (but not all) of the things that are complained about here have been fixed, but Steve Benett's classic blog post verbalises all the problems I have with the git UI way better than I can, and is still quite valid: https://stevebennett.me/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-gi...
Comment linking /2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git/
on “Purposes, Concepts, Misfits, and a Redesign of Git”Submitted Things I hate about Git (2012) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAre you serious? Git is by far the least user-friendly version control system I've used (Mercurial being the best). Here are some longer articles explaining why git sucks so much (from a convenience / user friendliness point of view): http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/git-is-a-harrier-jump... http://merrigrove.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/why-heck-is-git-so-... http://stevebennett.me/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about…
Comment linking /2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git/
on “Simple Revision Control”Submitted 10 things I hate about Git as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhich is awful, because there's nothing stopping usability development in CLI environments (look at Cortana or Siri, for example, or to a lesser extent PowerShell) except that awful stagnation. People shouldn't have to bend their brain to work with a machine. The machine should be designed to work with human brains. And to be that snarky person for a second: I've heard a lot of people who actually love Linux CLIs st…
Comment linking /2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git/
on “I Botched a Perl 6 Release”Submitted 10 things I hate about Git (2012) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWow, another great writeup. I did a sort of half-arsed version of that here: https://stevebennett.me/2020/01/03/alternative-earth-procedu... I basically took a square grid and then just randomly displaced each of the vertices a bit to disguise the fact that there is a grid at all. I just wasn't really clever enough to come up with any other way to do deterministic procedural generation.
Comment linking /2020/01/03/alternative-earth-procedurally-generated-map-using-vector-tiles/
on “Triangle Grids (2022)”This was my attempt at this problem, many years ago: https://stevebennett.me/2010/11/26/introducing-cooking-for-e...
Comment linking /2010/11/26/introducing-cooking-for-engineers/
on “Show HN: Eattsy – Reimagining the world’s relationship with cooking and food”
