Top all-time · #313
Dr. Drang
Personal blog · leancrew.comprogrammingmath
Dr. Drang writes And now it’s all this, a personal blog at leancrew.com about programming and math. Since 2009, 161 different Hacker News readers have linked it 365 times, most often “Knuth and the Unix Way”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dr. Drang's posts mostly for the Knuth-versus-McIlroy shell-pipeline story and the daylight-saving-time case, and for pieces on Hyperloop, Python's standard library and XML.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- DST post: reasons laid out nicely, a favourite counterargument. Knuth–McIlroy post: a classic, worth a read.
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?
- Knuth and the Unix Way29 people · 38 mentions · first linked 2011-12-08
- More shell, less egg (2011)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-10-10
- On Hyperloop6 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2013-08-19
- iPhone 15 Pro facts and estimates6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-09-13
- /all-this/2012/04/where-modules-go-to-die/6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2012-05-01
- /all-this/2012/04/where-modules-go-to-die/5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-08-24
- Apple gold4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-03-07
- Old Icons4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-07-08
- Wordle and grep3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-02-05
- Timers, reminders, alarms – oh, my3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-02-26
What Hacker News says?
> However, its interesting to see so many dependencies that are required to build it (73 crates last time I checked) The problem is that Rust has two issues: 1) In Rust, you don't pay for what you don't use. This means that a lot of stuff tends to be an external library since not using something means you can exclude it COMPLETELY . The issue is that things tend to get atomized more finely than most languages would…
Comment linking /all-this/2012/04/where-modules-go-to-die/
on “Introducing nushell”Submitted I hate stacked area charts (2011) as a story · 369 points
HN discussionThere's another interesting story about Knuth that's worth repeating here. http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg... The tl;dr is that Knuth wrote an elaborate implementation of a program to solve a particular problem, and Doug McIlroy replaced it entirely with a six step shell pipeline. (Knuth's program was written using his literate programming tools, could be typeset in TeX, and involved som…
Comment linking /all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
on “The Yoda of Silicon Valley”Submitted Apple gold as a story · 362 points
HN discussionso a rebuttal/companion to http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg...
Comment linking /all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
on “Donald Knuth was framed”Submitted Knuth and the Unix Way as a story · 231 points
HN discussionI'm going to go against the grain and advocate in favor of daylight saving time, mostly because the alternatives are worse. Dr. Drang lays out the reasons nicely: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ >If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times fo…
Comment linking /all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/
on “EU to recommend that member states abolish daylight saving time”Submitted On Hyperloop as a story · 167 points
HN discussionYes. IOW, GUI's are not as easily scriptable as CLI programs, to compose operations from combinations of other operations, even though some tools to do stuff like that do exist, e.g. AutoHotKey and others like it. A classic CLI command composition (a.k.a. pipeline) example: More shell, less egg: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg... After reading that post, I wrote about it here: https://ju…
Comment linking /all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
on “12 Factor CLI Apps”Submitted The Antikythera mechanism – 254:19 ratio as a story · 162 points
HN discussionProbably an uninformed response, but this looks a lot like menlo to me. Edit: People compare to DejaVu sans serif - which is almost identical to menlo as well: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2009/10/the-compleat-menlov...
Comment linking /all-this/2009/10/the-compleat-menlovera-sans-comparison/
on “Hack: A typeface designed for source code”Submitted 2:40 as a story · 154 points
HN discussionI find your certainty about something you appear to know nothing about mind boggling. Every crash is a deficiency of sorts, so let’s just tell Airbus to build planes that don’t crash! Easy! Let’s just have peace instead of war! Obvious! It is not sufficient to point out “obvious deficiencies”, one must also point out possible improvements. As other posters (with more patience than I can muster) have pointed out, it…
Comment linking /all-this/2019/11/galileo-and-failure/
on “Almost 1 in 3 pilots in Pakistan have fake licenses, aviation minister says”Submitted The Python Standard Library - Where Modules Go To Die as a story · 122 points
HN discussionIt comes from NeXTSTEP, text fields were given several emacs compatible keystroke editing commands as part of the key bindings for NSTextField and NSTextView. You can modify the default keybindings and even add more emacs compatible keystrokes if you find it helpful and most Cocoa apps will inherit the new keystrokes: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html (it's a good article that also has some inter…
Comment linking /all-this/2011/11/capitalization-keybinding/
on “Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim – Learning the lesson of vi”Submitted Square roots and maxima as a story · 121 points
HN discussionThis is definitely the most interesting part of the article for me: Incidentally, this problem set the scene for a wizard duel between two computer scientists several decades ago. In 1986, Jon Bentley asked Donald Knuth to show off “literate programming” with a solution to this problem, and he came up with an exquisite, ten-page Knuthian masterpiece. Then Doug McIlroy (the inventor of Unix pipelines) replied with a…
Comment linking /all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
on “Performance comparison: counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, Awk, Forth, Rust”Submitted My Contribution to Markdown as a story · 120 points
HN discussion>From that perspective, it was entirely reasonable to believe that if a command was so complex that it needed options than it was likely more appropriate for one of the other user interfaces What would the non-shell interface to commands for text processing pipelining (e.g. sort, cut, grep, etc., all of which absolutely need options to function) have looked like? Some people to this day believe that any text process…
Comment linking /all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
on “Unix command line conventions over time”Submitted Apple and LaTeX as a story · 119 points
HN discussion> > Bundling dependencies in the stdlib "solves" the problem by making new major versions impossible. > > Yes, which is a feature. For example Go is very annoying about this not only on the stdlib. https://go.dev/doc/go1compat a lot of 3rd party libs follow this principle as well. But there's no reason such a "feature" requires bundling dependencies in the stdlib. As you mention 3rd party Go libs manage to do this p…
Comment linking /all-this/2012/04/where-modules-go-to-die/
on “Rewriting Rust”Submitted In defense of Unix as a story · 110 points
HN discussionBut there's a downside to putting things like that in the standard library. Python also went for a "batteries included approach" but it hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows. There's a reason why the Python standard library is known as the place where modules go to die: https://leancrew.com/all-this/2012/04/where-modules-go-to-di...
Comment linking /all-this/2012/04/where-modules-go-to-die/
on “Half a million lines of Go”Submitted Old graph paper as a story · 110 points
HN discussion>is "Why would I want to write a complicated mess like that?" Just use ${FAVORITE_PROG_LANG:-Perl, Ruby, or whatever}". Some discussion on the pros and cons of those two approaches, here: More shell, less egg: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg... I had written quick solutions to that problem in both Python and Unix shell (bash), here: The Bentley-Knuth problem and solutions: https://jugad2…
Comment linking /all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
on “Problem solving with Unix commands”Submitted Sinusoidal Sunlight as a story · 100 points
HN discussionCarmack weights in: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1293311943995002881 "This HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24123878 is topical for me: at this very moment, I am implementing C++ MFCC code myself, because my attempt to integrate Kaldi (on windows) was unpleasant. It already took more than an afternoon, but I learned good things! \ I'm more sympathetic to the Use-All-The-Dependencies cro…
Comment linking /all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
on “Never use a dependency that you could replace with an afternoon of programming”Submitted Reducing the Size of Large PDFs as a story · 97 points
HN discussionI hope that their math section is better than some of their engineering courses. See the critique at, http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2012/12/khan/ I've also been involved in teaching similar material as Dr. Drang and agree completely with his critique. I've come across students who've had similar sloppy teaching and had to re-teach material so they could unlearn what they'd learnt and get a proper foundation for m…
Comment linking /all-this/2012/12/khan/
on “Ask HN: How or where to begin learning mathematics from first principles?”Submitted Wordle and grep as a story · 84 points
HN discussion
