Top all-time · #5633
Dennis Forbes
Personal blog · yafla.com/dforbes · on HN as ergo98programmingcareer
Dennis Forbes writes yafla Inc., a personal blog at yafla.com about programming and career. Since 2007, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “"Fragmentation IS progress"”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for posts on large MySQL data loads, a critique of Coding Horror, and domain name registration. Comments mostly discuss the topics; one calls an older post still helpful.
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.
yafla Inc. is a technology company that builds its own software products, including Chess Report at chessreport.ca, and custom software for clients.
Most-linked posts?
- "Fragmentation IS progress"2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-06-04
- Fighting The NoSQL Mindset2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-03-24
What Hacker News says?
As a long time skeptic of the NoSQL craze that seems to have (happily!) peaked, I have to say that no, I'm not very surprised by this. Databases (real databases) are using indexing technology that's been proven over not just years but decades of use and refinement. log2(500000000) is still only 28. Double that and it's only 29. And these databases' indexes are typically btrees with much higher branching factors than…
Comment linking /dforbes/The_Impact_of_SSDs_on_Database_Performance_and_the_Performance_Paradox_of_Data_Explodification/
on “Loading half a billion rows into MySQL”Submitted Dear NoSQL: "SQL-isn't-scalable" is a lie as a story · 138 points
HN discussionTo quote from http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/Coding_Horror_Strikes_Again : Coding Horror is an entertaining, sometimes even educational blog. Be careful diving in headfirst, though, as the technical depth is generally so shallow you'll be hitting the bottom before you've even broken through the surface tension. Based on what I have (managed to) read at CH I find this description to be fairly accurate.
Comment linking /dforbes/Coding_Horror_Strikes_Again
on “"Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck”Submitted Fighting The NoSQL Mindset as a story · 113 points
HN discussionSunspider is a particularly bad benchmark: Virtually all of the components are heavily weighted by string concatenation. http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/String_Concatenation_and_Immuta...
Comment linking /dforbes/String_Concatenation_and_Immutable_Strings_Speeding_Spidermonkey/
on “Mozilla's JM crosses Apple's Nitro threshold”Submitted Coding Horror Strikes Again (RE: Windows 7 UI) as a story · 40 points
HN discussionTake a look of this one, a little bit of old but still helpful: http://www.yafla.com/dennisforbes/Interesting-Facts-About-Do... I registered a 5 letter domain (xruby.com) in 2006. I think there are still 5 letter domains available, but good names are extremely hard to find.
Comment linking /dennisforbes/Interesting-Facts-About-Domain-Names/Interesting-Facts-About-Domain-Names.html
on “Are all the good domains taken?”Submitted Dennis Forbes Responds to Joe Stump on the NoSQL Debate as a story · 23 points
HN discussionAs someone who was using "AJAX" quite extensively using hidden IFRAMEs and then in 1999, XMLHttpRequest -- long before a Johnny-come-lately coined AJAX, I had to comment on this- http://www.yafla.com/dennisforbes/How-I-Came-To-Despise-AJAX... It was first added "to" Internet Explorer by the MSXML team (by a guy sneaking in some functionality for the Exchange Outlook Web Access team). It was actually a great example…
Comment linking /dennisforbes/How-I-Came-To-Despise-AJAX/How-I-Came-To-Despise-AJAX.html
on “Why I'm not happy about IE9”Submitted The Hyperinflation of XMLSpy as a story · 11 points
HN discussionAnother guy who evaluates the Android ecosystem as a pseudo-iPhone. It isn't. http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/If_Android_was_HTML5_then_the_i... Read it. Absorb. Learn.
Comment linking /dforbes/If_Android_was_HTML5_then_the_iPhone_OS_would_be_ActiveX/
on “Android’s Growth Rate and How It Actually Hurts The App Market”Submitted Getting Real about NoSQL and the SQL Performance Lie as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Underappreciated Art of Duct Tape Programming as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Most Destructive Metric in Software Development as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Being "Bad" -or- The Startup Lottery Ticket as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Internal Code Reuse Considered Dangerous (agree) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Web Isn't Stateless as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted 5 tips for enjoying the software development profession [2006] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted "Fragmentation IS progress" as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Simple color picker for non-designer web devs as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Best and Worst of 2008 (Dennis Forbes) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
