Top all-time · #5342
Useless Factor
Personal blog · useless-factor.blogspot.comprogrammingsystems
Useless Factor is a personal blog at useless-factor.blogspot.com about programming and systems. Since 2007, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “Why not mmap?”. The last post was in 2011, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for posts on programming languages and tooling, including Church numerals and the lambda calculus, IDEs that surface the AST, and Linux fsync semantics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Adventures in computing and the Factor programming language
Most-linked posts?
- Why not mmap?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-05-19
- Matching, diffing and merging XML2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-01-27
What Hacker News says?
It would be nice to have an IDE that surfaced something like the AST. Of course lots do to some extent, but I bet there is room for improvement here. This also seems like a place where Lisp would have an advantage since the syntax is so transparent. For readers of yesterday's article about whether all the "easy" stuff has already been accomplished, here is an easy-to-read survey of the state of the art in diffing tr…
Comment linking /2008/01/matching-diffing-and-merging-xml.html
on “Always bet on text”Submitted Why not mmap? as a story · 94 points
HN discussionIf Church numerals’ unary representation bothers you, there is an efficient embedding of naturals in λ-calculus as linked lists of Booleans. Well, more efficient than the alternative… http://useless-factor.blogspot.com/2007/04/thoughts-on-churc...
Comment linking /2007/04/thoughts-on-church-numerals.html
on “The Lambda Calculus”Submitted A couple GC algorithms in more detail as a story · 16 points
HN discussion> I don't know what the intended use case actually is, Generally speaking, if you've got a database system of some sort and want to write data to a file. > It's still not enough: with write ordering and notification but no instruction to actually write the data soon, the kernel can buffer it indefinitely. That's not really the problem -- being able to say "do this write operation after this other write operation" wo…
Comment linking /2011/05/why-not-mmap.html
on “Linux's fsync() woes are getting some attention”Submitted Tired of academia, gonna work for Google as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted A quick intro to garbage collection as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Explaining garbage collection as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted New mark-compact garbage collection algorithms as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Learning Factor as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted High School Computer Science Education as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Instruction scheduling for register pressure as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted XML isn't as bad as people make it out to be: a discussion about XML, flat files, and s-expressions as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Startup idea: Cloud storage platform with configurable SLAs as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bitfields in Factor structs and the special style as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A second introduction to Unicode as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Matching, diffing and merging XML as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Factor FAQ as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
