Top all-time · #12096
🪄 Technical Sourcery
Personal blog · technicalsourcery.net/postsprogrammingsystems
🪄 Technical Sourcery is a personal blog at technicalsourcery.net about programming and systems. Since 2019, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “All about Time”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
The linked post covers lessons learned over thirty years of software development, including a piece on time. One commenter points readers to it as a clearer treatment of the same points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Delving deep into the technical arts
Most-linked posts?
- All about Time4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-06-18
- On Endianness (2021)2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-12-02
- Endianness, a constant source of conflict for decades2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-08-02
What Hacker News says?
https://technicalsourcery.net/posts/time/ says this better than I did.
Comment linking /posts/time/
on “Things I learnt the hard way in thirty years of software development”Submitted Endianness, a constant source of conflict for decades as a story · 74 points
HN discussionPlease please please please don't perpetuate this idea that all stored timezones must be UTC. Timezones are always necessary, and while they can often just be UTC, they can't always be [1]. [1] https://technicalsourcery.net/posts/time/
Comment linking /posts/time/
on “Things I learnt the hard way in thirty years of software development”Submitted On Endianness (2021) as a story · 59 points
HN discussionI was hoping that he'd cover the different kinds of time, and where each kind is used in a program, but nobody seems to think about it: * Absolute Time: A time value fixed to UTC. * Fixed Time: A time value fixed to a specific time zone. * Floating Time: A time value that is interpreted according to the time zone of the observer. https://technicalsourcery.net/posts/time/
Comment linking /posts/time/
on “Infinite loop in macOS Night Shift in the summer near the Arctic Circle”Submitted Virtual Linux Remote Desktop as a story · 28 points
HN discussionYes, I have all three: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kstenerud/ https://github.com/kstenerud/ https://www.technicalsourcery.net/
Comment linking /
on “Takeaways from looking for a new senior role in tech”Submitted A mini study of line lengths as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe only annoying thing with QR codes is that they're limited to text formats, so I came up with a little tweak to support encoding ad-hoc hierarchical binary data into QR codes awhile back: https://www.technicalsourcery.net/posts/qr-superpowers/
Comment linking /posts/qr-superpowers/
on “How a QR code works”Submitted On Endianness as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI actually did a writeup on this: https://www.technicalsourcery.net/posts/on-endianness/ TLDR: Little endian is better for most data situations (and incidentally is a more natural ordering for humans), so it's good that it won out in the end.
Comment linking /posts/on-endianness/
on “Byte Ordering: On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace (1980)”Submitted Endianness as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhich is fine for past events, but doesn't solve the issue of future or repeating events. There are actually three main kinds of time: absolute time, fixed time, and floating time [1]. Storing everything in UTC only solves for situations involving absolute time. [1] https://technicalsourcery.net/posts/time-timezones/
Comment linking /posts/time-timezones/
on “Some views on having your system timezone set to UTC”Submitted All about Time as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe natural endianness is "little endian", as it was originally devised in India. We just do it backwards (big endian) in left-to-right writing systems due to inertia (though originally for backwards compatibility with existing mathematical texts in the 10th century). Little endian has too many advantages to be ignored, which is why all popular architectures and also newer protocols are now little endian. I did a wr…
Comment linking /posts/on-endianness/
on “Endiannes and Polymorphism in Rust”Submitted Time · Technichal Sourcery as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI wrote up a blog post about the strengths of each endianness: https://technicalsourcery.net/posts/on-endianness/ Short short version: It's all about where your imaginary "margin" is. Little endian works best with "upward growing" data, where the data grows from the low bits into the empty high bits (for example integers). Big endian works best with "downward growing" data, where the data grows from the high bits to…
Comment linking /posts/on-endianness/
on “On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace (1980)”Isn't endianness either little or selectable on most (if not all) microcontrollers these days? For example https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/pdf/nRF52832_PS_v1.3.pdf is little endian. Considering that little endian is objectively better for more types of data structures than big endian is [1], one would expect things to eventually converge on little endian (barring the entrenched big endian network protocols that ho…
Comment linking /posts/on-endianness/
on “Quite OK Audio Format”
