Top all-time · #254
Jamie Brandon
Personal blog · scattered-thoughts.net/writing · on HN as jamiiprogrammingsystemsdata
Jamie Brandon writes Scattered Thoughts, a personal blog at scattered-thoughts.net about programming, systems and data. Since 2010, 191 different Hacker News readers have linked it 432 times, most often “Against SQL (2021)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jamie Brandon's posts for critiques of SQL and its compositionality, and for analysis of Zig's memory safety compared with Rust and C.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- One commenter calls the Zig and Rust comparison a great in-depth comparison from someone who used both; others call the SQL critique the obligatory reading or a
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?
- Against SQL (2021)22 people · 26 mentions · first linked 2022-01-17
- How safe is Zig?18 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2021-12-23
- How Safe Is Zig?10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2021-03-20
- A survey of OLAP and HTAP query engines6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-09-28
- /writing/against-sql6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-09-11
- Moving Faster6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-10-06
- Internal Consistency in Streaming Systems5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-04-18
- Internal Consistency in Streaming Systems5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-01-06
- Things Unlearned After a Decade of Programming5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-03-12
- Thoughts on Coding5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-12-21
What Hacker News says?
I totally buy your argument (and that's why the "X in rust" took place on HN) but zig is not any safer than most modern languages: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/
Comment linking /writing/how-safe-is-zig/
on “Bun: Fast JavaScript runtime, transpiler, and NPM client written in Zig”Submitted Against SQL as a story · 499 points
HN discussionTime to pull up my RSS reader! https://drewdevault.com/ http://jvns.ca/ https://www.benkuhn.net/ https://danluu.com/ https://scattered-thoughts.net/ http://antirez.com/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/ https://neilkakkar.com/ https://zachholman.com/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/ https://endler.dev/ https://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/ https://www.the-paper-trail.org/ https://tonsky.me/ https://dave.cheney.net/ https://b…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust as a story · 343 points
HN discussionIt is https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/
Comment linking /
on “There's no reason for software to be slow anymore”Submitted Small Tech as a story · 313 points
HN discussionObligatory reading https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/against-sql/
Comment linking /writing/against-sql/
on “PRQL – A proposal for a better SQL”Submitted Fast B-Trees as a story · 271 points
HN discussionMore on the missing memory safety of Zig: https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/ Discussion from 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26537693
Comment linking /writing/how-safe-is-zig/
on “Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust”Submitted How safe is Zig? as a story · 261 points
HN discussionThere have been proposals to have global state in programming languages which function like databases with the advantages of monitoring/persistence/naming etc, but also retain the modularity of local state. https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/local-state-is-ha... https://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/local-state-is-p...
Comment linking /writing/local-state-is-harmful/
on “Databases in 2024: A Year in Review”Submitted Three months of Rust as a story · 244 points
HN discussionI spent 5 years working on a SQL database (materialize.com) and I think SQL is awful. https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/against-sql (by another former Materialize employee) is a good takedown.
Comment linking /writing/against-sql
on “Sq.io: jq for databases and more”Submitted The State of Linux Debuggers as a story · 237 points
HN discussionThere was some discussion in http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2015/02/24/january--february... > While running in the browser is a requirement for Eve, it's always been clear that using javascript directly was not a long-term option. So many of our implementation problems come down to lack of control over data layout. For Eve we need to implement: > New types (like intervals) - but there is a space overhead of 24 extr…
Comment linking /blog/2015/06/04/three-months-of-rust/
on “Eve Version 0”Submitted Why isn't differential dataflow more popular? as a story · 228 points
HN discussionAnd here I was thinking the author must have been using a higher level language. I remembered reading this blog[0] where the author stated that the worst case scenario for an insertion at the beginning of a 2mb file only took 2ms on an old laptop while using an array as the data structure. I believe the author was using Zig here. [0]: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/focus-text/
Comment linking /writing/focus-text/
on “Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)”Submitted SQL is syntactic sugar for relational algebra as a story · 216 points
HN discussionI suggest using the fact foreign keys are constraints with unique names, and using these names to explicitly specify what column(s) to join between the two foreign key tables. In PostgreSQL [2], foreign key contraint names only need to be unique per table, which allows using the foreign table "as is" as the constraint name, which allows for nice short names. In other databases, the names will just need to be a littl…
Comment linking /writing/against-sql/
on “Against SQL”Submitted The program is the database is the interface as a story · 204 points
HN discussionGiven that the author also wrote https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/select-wat-from-sql/ , I don't think he knows nothing about inner joins. I think he was just using that equivalent form to compare it with the terser `foo.bar.quux`. It is pretty strange to compare it with `fk_join(foo, 'bar_id', bar, 'quux_id', quux)` though, because SQL already has the equivalent `foo JOIN bar USING bar_id JOIN quux USING quux…
Comment linking /writing/select-wat-from-sql/
on “Against SQL”Submitted Show HN: Clojure DSL for pattern-matching, parsing and generic programming as a story · 204 points
HN discussionSome people agree with you. For example https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/local-state-is-harmfu...
Comment linking /writing/local-state-is-harmful/
on “It's not what programming languages do, it's what they shepherd you to”Submitted Speed Matters as a story · 197 points
HN discussionMy limited understanding is that rust provides significant advantages in terms of memory safety[1], that should reduce the chance of errors and bugs, whilst c++11 does not provide these same advantages. [1] Comparison of memory safety of c vs Zig vs Rust (from elsewhere in the comments): https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/
Comment linking /writing/how-safe-is-zig/
on “Linus Torvalds: Rust for the Kernel Could Possibly Be Merged for Linux 5.20”Submitted How Safe Is Zig? as a story · 192 points
HN discussionZig case is not compelling enough: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/
Comment linking /writing/how-safe-is-zig/
on “Linus Torvalds: Rust for the Kernel Could Possibly Be Merged for Linux 5.20”Submitted Pinephone first steps as a story · 191 points
HN discussionIt's a known problem, especially with the move away from self-styled OOP paradigms and the rise of closure-infested programming. (I.e., "OOP, but with closures—and which (for overall very bad reasons) we're going to insist on describing as FP".) Recent thoughts by one of the Eve/Light Table developers: < https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/coding/ > (Ctrl+F on "hard-to-query state" and "reachable".)
Comment linking /writing/coding/
on “Thank You, Firebug (2017)”Submitted Things Unlearned as a story · 190 points
HN discussion
