Top all-time · #418
Lawrence Teamten
Personal blog · teamten.comprogrammingwriting
Lawrence Teamten writes Lawrence Kesteloot, a personal blog at teamten.com about programming and writing. Since 2009, 134 different Hacker News readers have linked it 183 times, most often “Coding Machines”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 12 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog mostly for the short story Coding Machines, a Trusting Trust tale, and for the essays Java for Everything and Norris Numbers.
- Recommended for · 12 comments
- Commenters call Coding Machines excellent and great, and say Java for Everything and Norris Numbers are worth reading.
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?
- Coding Machines52 people · 58 mentions · first linked 2017-07-19
- Java for Everything (2014)11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2017-12-02
- Java for Everything8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2014-11-30
- Write Code Top-Down7 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2020-11-11
- Norris Numbers – Walls you hit in program size (2014)5 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-05-23
- Don't write bugs4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-10-06
- Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-02-19
- Coding Machines3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-04-03
- Use singular nouns for database table names3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-04-30
- Norris numbers3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-07-23
What Hacker News says?
> Reminds me of Yudkowsky’s line[1] about AI: “we should be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.” That op-ed reminds me of some short fiction you might like: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
Comment linking /lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
on “The man who killed Google Search?”Submitted Java for Everything as a story · 387 points
HN discussionYeah, I indeed spend some effort to steal the fonts from asciidoctor and https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/ (highly recommend both). And yes, I myself am struggling with ragged right. I really wish to have proper text hyphenation and justification, to have a book-like feel. Sadly, justification without hyphenation looks ugly, and `hyphens: auto` doesn’t work well (and wasn’t supported in chrome last time…
Comment linking /lawrence/programming/
on “Architecture.md”Submitted Why I Don't Like Golang (2016) as a story · 296 points
HN discussionShell does things well provided all the intermediate states are naturally expressible as streams of bytes. Otherwise not so much. I think the advantages of using a single language for everything outweigh the disadvantages - see e.g. http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everything... (though actually my single language is Scala)
Comment linking /lawrence/writings/java-for-everything.html
on ““It's The Future””Submitted Turbo Pascal Compiler (2013) as a story · 234 points
HN discussionYou've stumbled across the Fox and Rabbit Product paradigm: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/fox-and-rabbit-pro...
Comment linking /lawrence/writings/fox-and-rabbit-products.html
on “Why Nukemap Isn't on Google Maps Anymore”Submitted Norris Numbers – Walls you hit in program size (2014) as a story · 189 points
HN discussion> love your approach to building complex features, building the skeleton first with asserts for uimplemeted code paths Write code top-down < https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/write-code-top-... >: > With bottom-up design you start with the components [...] Designing a component is a small tractable task that can be finished and called _done_. You’re creating a perfect, beautiful, reusable jewel. All engin…
Comment linking /lawrence/programming/write-code-top-down.html
on “SerenityOS demo at Handmade Seattle 2021 [video]”Submitted Java for Everything (2014) as a story · 172 points
HN discussion> there is no time/budget to re-do it in house What are the actual time cost savings when you take the total costs into consideration?[1][2] What would it look like if you didn't implement an app by stringing together dozens/hundreds/thousands of third-party modules implemented bottom-up, but instead took control of the whole thing top-down?[3] 1. https://jvns.ca/blog/2021/11/15/esbuild-vue/ 2. https://news.ycombina…
Comment linking /lawrence/programming/write-code-top-down.html
on “Security issue related to the NPM registry”Submitted Coding Machines as a story · 165 points
HN discussionShort story about an AI keeping itself hidden through this attack: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
Comment linking /lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
on “Ken Thompson really did launch his "trusting trust" trojan attack in real life”Submitted Why I Don't Like Golang (2016) as a story · 140 points
HN discussionI had to look up “Karger-Thompson” to make sure, and came upon this: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/ Dunno yet how it ends, but I'm just happy that someone writes fiction involving assembly instructions.
Comment linking /lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
on “BootOS: Monolithic operating system in 512 bytes of x86 machine code”Submitted Norris numbers as a story · 132 points
HN discussionI don't think this is what you're looking for, but Coding Machines[1] is a great little story in which the Ken Thompson hack[2] plays a role. [1] https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/ [2] https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
Comment linking /lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
on “A possible new back end for Rust”Submitted Don't write bugs as a story · 131 points
HN discussionThere’s definitely a little truth to that, but the good ones are also more conscious over time of assumptions and dependencies and how to think about code and what to do and what not to do - and they will talk to you about it at length if you ask them. Half the problem is the young ones frequently don’t ask or listen. I was there once, young and full of pride and energy and not listening, and these days watch younge…
Comment linking /lawrence/writings/norris-numbers.html
on “The forty-year programmer”Submitted Show HN: My Turbo Pascal compiler in JavaScript as a story · 101 points
HN discussionRelated: Java for Everything https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everythin... Previously HN discussion of "Java for Everything": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26934297
Comment linking /lawrence/writings/java-for-everything.html
on “Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail”Submitted Apple IIa – ROM for the Apple IIe That Compiles Basic (2018) as a story · 99 points
HN discussionCoding Machines by Lawrence Kesteloot: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/ Lovecraft meets Trusting Trust.
Comment linking /lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
on “Hard comp-fi reading list”Submitted Why I Don't Like Golang (2016) as a story · 93 points
HN discussionRemembers me the “Java for Everything” blog post: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everythin... Also, thank you for sharing! I do appreciate Java and I’m glad to see it can be used for scripting nowadays.
Comment linking /lawrence/writings/java-for-everything.html
on “Java in the Small”Submitted Norris Numbers as a story · 90 points
HN discussion> But since it’s trendy people try to apply it to everything. When people do things you don't understand, don't just say that they're just doing it because it's fashionable. Sure, they might be — or they have their own reasons. I use Rust in a couple of places outside of its original "systems programming" niche, where, yeah, I don't really need to track every allocation, I don't care about GC pauses, I don't need to…
Comment linking /lawrence/writings/java-for-everything.html
on “Rust Language Cheat Sheet”Submitted Java for Everything (2014) as a story · 89 points
HN discussionThat's interesting, I didn't quite expect that answer! Obviously I don't know your exact situation, and I can't hope to offer actual advice, but I can still empathize, and pretend to help, and suggest mental frames that have helped me. Imagine that everything I say here is me talking to myself rather than telling you what to do. :) Like a lot of people, I'm way better at seeing how to solve other people's problems t…
Comment linking /lawrence/writings/norris-numbers.html
on “I’ve become worse at programming”Submitted Neural Nets (1994) as a story · 84 points
HN discussion
