Top all-time · #86
Yossi Kreinin
Personal blog · yosefk.comhardwareprogramming
Yossi Kreinin's personal blog at yosefk.com covers hardware and programming. Since 2008, 390 different Hacker News readers have linked it 689 times, most often “C++ Frequently Questioned Answers”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 12 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Yossi Kreinin's blog for thoughtful writing on programming and C++, including the C++ FQA and posts on management and productivity. Commenters call it a good read.
- Recommended for · 12 comments
- Called amazing, brilliant and usually a good read; the C++ FQA called entertaining and quite good.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- C++ Frequently Questioned Answers38 people · 41 mentions · first linked 2008-09-26
- My history with Forth and stack machines (2010)23 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2014-08-07
- My history with Forth and stack machines (2010)18 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2018-11-26
- C++ Frequently Questioned Answers (2009)17 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2018-04-12
- Defective C++14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2008-07-04
- Yosefk - My history with Forth & stack machines11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2010-09-10
- I can't believe I'm praising Tcl (2008)8 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2014-11-14
- Redundancy vs dependencies: which is worse?8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2008-05-28
- People can read their manager's mind (2015)8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2021-09-25
- Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice (2013)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-10-20
What Hacker News says?
The Web is two things. First, it's the promise that a certain runtime with a specific minimum set of capabilities is available almost anywhere. Secondly, it's a staggeringly-huge installed base of stuff written for that runtime. I don't think there's anything out there in the that matches the volume of deployed HTML, CSS and JS in the wild. The horribly sad part is that HTML, CSS and JS are a gigantic Rube Goldberg…
Comment linking /blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines.html
on “Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust”Submitted Advantages of incompetent management as a story · 543 points
HN discussionreaders may tangentially enjoy yosefk's "cardinal programming jokes" -- the first one featuring a manhole: https://yosefk.com/blog/the-cardinal-programming-jokes.html > I must warn you about those jokes. Firstly, they are translated from Russian and Hebrew by yours truly, which may cause them to lose some of their charm. Secondly, I'm not sure they came with that much charm to begin with, because my taste in jokes (…
Comment linking /blog/the-cardinal-programming-jokes.html
on “20GB leak of Intel data: whole Git repositories, dev tools, backdoor mentions”Submitted Evil programmer's tip: avoid “easy” things (2016) as a story · 517 points
HN discussionOK, Unix was probably available to Knuth, but the task given to Knuth was not to promote any already written programs! Had he done so it would be claimed that he missed to do what was requested of him to do. Even today, if you would get the exactly same task, with the goal to make the most efficient solution when you have to care about the limitations of hardware available to you and to produce the self contained pr…
Comment linking /blog/what-worse-is-better-vs-the-right-thing-is-really-about.html
on “The Yoda of Silicon Valley”Submitted How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one as a story · 379 points
HN discussion> If you want to avoid C++ that's great, but to argue for C over it is insanity rooted in nostalgia. Did you know that code in C++ can run outside of main()? I used to be a C++ believer, and advocated for C++ over our companies use of Java. One day, they decided they wanted to "optimize" the build, by compiling and linking objects in alphabetical order. The compile and link worked great, the program crashed when it…
Comment linking /c++fqa/
on “Fuchsia is not Linux”Submitted LLMs aren't world models as a story · 371 points
HN discussionI would mention also http://yosefk.com/blog/?s=10x
Comment linking /blog/?s=10x
on “Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity”Submitted Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50? as a story · 355 points
HN discussionFar from daily, but Yosef K's blog is usually a good read when he does post: http://www.yosefk.com/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted A 100x speedup with unsafe Python as a story · 318 points
HN discussionBacktraces work without that. http://yosefk.com/blog/getting-the-call-stack-without-a-fram...
Comment linking /blog/getting-the-call-stack-without-a-frame-pointer.html
on “An Intro to Compilers”Submitted Why bad scientific code beats code following “best practices” (2014) as a story · 283 points
HN discussionOnce you've got the basics down from a tutorial (old C++ or modern C++), move on to internalizing all the lessons here: https://isocpp.org/faq (what Marshall Cline's excellent C++ FAQ has become) and here: https://herbsutter.com/gotw/ (Not as organized, but Herb Sutter wrestles with the essential questions of how to deal with the tricky bits of C++) If you've got the cash, read Effective Modern C++ by Scott Meyers.…
Comment linking /c++fqa/
on “Ask HN: Best way to learn modern C++?”Submitted The state of AI for hand-drawn animation inbetweening as a story · 262 points
HN discussionRelated to http://yosefk.com/blog/redundancy-vs-dependencies-which-is-w...
Comment linking /blog/redundancy-vs-dependencies-which-is-worse.html
on “The Wrong Abstraction (2016)”Submitted Bad scientific code beats code following "best practices" (2014) as a story · 230 points
HN discussionRecent-ishly on HN: https://yosefk.com/blog/advantages-of-incompetent-management...
Comment linking /blog/advantages-of-incompetent-management.html
on “A change of heart regarding employee metrics”Submitted Monorepo is great if you're really good as a story · 225 points
HN discussionReminds me of a quote from Yossi Kreinin: CMM has 5 levels. CMM level 1 is where you operate right now: it denotes the ability to ship something. CMM level 5, the one mentioned in the interview from Kent Beck's book, denotes complete paralysis. To do anything, you have to write or update so many documents, have so many meetings with "relevant stakeholders", and to perform so many pointless measurements of the defect…
Comment linking /blog/extreme-programming-explained.html
on “If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?”Submitted Doing Everyone Else's Job as a story · 215 points
HN discussionHave you ever looked at how useless Chuck Moore's stuff is? Like, the chip designs are of the type “384 independent Forth chips with tiny amounts of RAM and mediocre interconnects, and if you want to actually do anything with them, you'll need to use 128 of them to program your own DDR3 controller”. Or, he demonstrates how awesome Forth is by showing that you can do “the guts of a disk driver” in five lines, except…
Comment linking /blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines.html
on “That's not an abstraction, that's a layer of indirection”Submitted Taking Up Animation as a Hobby as a story · 214 points
HN discussionElsewhere in this thread, someone posted this rebuttal to the article, which I think is much more nuanced and well thought through. It also emphasizes the value of relationships and kindness in a way the original article does not: https://yosefk.com/blog/do-call-yourself-a-programmer-and-ot... I wound up subscribing to that blog’s RSS feed, because the articles, though infrequent, seem to be generally interesting an…
Comment linking /blog/do-call-yourself-a-programmer-and-other-career-advice.html
on “Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)”Submitted Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice as a story · 214 points
HN discussionOn the other hand: https://yosefk.com/blog/do-call-yourself-a-programmer-and-ot...
Comment linking /blog/do-call-yourself-a-programmer-and-other-career-advice.html
on “Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)”Submitted People can read their manager's mind (2015) as a story · 199 points
HN discussionSteve Yegge http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/ Wil Shipley https://blog.wilshipley.com/ Yossi Kreinin http://yosefk.com/ All three brilliant, with good sense of humor and having good "vision thing"
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”Submitted Why bad scientific code beats code following "best practices" as a story · 198 points
HN discussion
