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Thomas Burette
Personal blog · thomasburette.com/blogprogramming
Thomas Burette's personal blog at thomasburette.com covers programming. Since 2018, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times, most often “So you want to write your own CSV code (2014)”. The last post was in 2014, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Burette's posts, especially a 2014 article on writing your own CSV code that argues CSV's simplicity is deceptive. Other posts cover Monte Carlo methods and an Emacs web server.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal website
Most-linked posts?
- So you want to write your own CSV code (2014)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-08-30
What Hacker News says?
A while ago I wrote a similar interactive article to prove that the martingale betting technique at the roulette doesn't work : [1]. The martingale is when you bet 1, double the bet each time you lose, start again at 1 when you win. The aim was to create a single page anybody could link to that proves without a doubt the abysmal odds of making money off the roulette with the martingale technique. Instead of pre-writ…
Comment linking /martingale/
on “Monte Carlo methods – Why it's a bad idea to go to the casino”Submitted So you want to write your own CSV code (2014) as a story · 303 points
HN discussionThank you for this article! I wrote a CSV parser in Javascript for my site https://www.csvplot.com . Even the "industry standard" PapaParse JS library was a lot slower than my no-frills implementation, so I thought I was onto something. Then I read the "So You Want To Write your own CSV Code" [0]. I realized if I supported every corner case I would lose my entire speed advantage, which in hindsight is obvious. That…
Comment linking /blog/2014/05/25/so-you-want-to-write-your-own-CSV-code/
on “Loading CSV File at the Speed Limit of the NVMe Storage”Submitted So You Want to Write Your Own CSV Code? (2014) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAround the same time I wrote a package for Emacs that would run a webserver within emacs so that you could interact with it remotely from a mobile browser: http://thomasburette.com/take-off/ . Since every action you can perform in emacs is just a piece of elisp code you can easily send any command to emacs. The input method on mobile however is another story. Pretty useless in practice but it was interesting to delv…
Comment linking /take-off/
on “Emacs on the iPhone (2014) [video]”Submitted The power of keeping a coding journal (2014) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is timely for me - I was just sharing this 2014 article with my team. http://thomasburette.com/blog/2014/05/25/so-you-want-to-writ... It made an impact on my approach to CSV handling, and helped me understand, "just because I can, doesn't mean I should".
Comment linking /blog/2014/05/25/so-you-want-to-write-your-own-CSV-code/
on “RFC 4180: Common Format and MIME Type for CSV Files (2005)”A pretty good summary of the sort of "deceptive simplicity" around csv: http://thomasburette.com/blog/2014/05/25/so-you-want-to-writ... And the related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7796268
Comment linking /blog/2014/05/25/so-you-want-to-write-your-own-CSV-code/
on “All software sucks (2011)”