Top all-time · #69
Matt Might
Personal blog · matt.might.net/articles · on HN as fadmmattprogrammingcareer
Matt Might's personal blog at matt.might.net covers programming and career. Since 2008, 486 different Hacker News readers have linked it 743 times, most often “The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Matt Might's blog for essays on academia, compilers and programming, and for his account of finding the cause of his son's rare illness.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- Called 'really good', 'a good read' and 'an absolutely amazing TODO list'; one said it 'deftly distills' a problem.
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?
- The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.73 people · 76 mentions · first linked 2010-08-09
- What every computer science major should know (2011)28 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2011-08-24
- The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010)25 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2021-08-26
- The CRAPL: An academic-strength open source license (2010)20 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2010-07-27
- Advanced programming languages (2009)18 people · 23 mentions · first linked 2009-12-13
- Shell scripts to improve your writing17 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2010-07-19
- Yacc is dead: An update15 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2010-12-13
- Memoizing recursive functions via the fixed-point Y combinator14 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2008-11-24
- Hunting Down My Son's Killer13 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2012-05-29
- Continuations by example: Exceptions, time-traveling search, threads, and more12 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2010-01-01
What Hacker News says?
Original article on Bertrand & how Matt Might investigated the cause of Bertrand's illness http://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/
Comment linking /articles/my-sons-killer/
on “Thanks, HN: You helped discover a disease and save lives”Submitted Hunting Down My Son's Killer as a story · 1139 points
HN discussion- Mz · 2014-07-18
I looked up the essential issue again to try to limit how badly I am perceived as opening mouth and inserting foot: http://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/#full N-Glycanase 1 plays an important role in deglycosylating misfolded proteins, allowing them to be recycled into their constituent amino acids. Bertrand's cells appear to be accumulating misfolded glycoproteins. And I went back to my own research notes.…
Comment linking /articles/my-sons-killer/
on “Thanks, HN: You helped discover a disease and save lives” Submitted What every computer science major should know (2011) as a story · 540 points
HN discussionOf course, no one can understand everything, but he said, "pick a subject". Just one, not everything. I'm reminded of this description of a PhD: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
Comment linking /articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
on “The Lesson to Unlearn”Submitted Resolutions for programmers as a story · 521 points
HN discussionActually I misunderstood how the author of that blog read the papers necessary to help his son (I read the story a while back). Here is another link from his blog: http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/ And under the section called "A regret: Not pushing for open-access" he says: "My hope is that tenure will provide me opportunities to steadily shift computer science and medicine toward high-quality, high-impact ope…
Comment linking /articles/tenure/
on “EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020”Submitted SSH tricks as a story · 425 points
HN discussionNot to mention the many average Joes who have already done some important work by reading open access papers in fields simply because they suddenly find causes to became motivated to go past the average Joe level. http://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/
Comment linking /articles/my-sons-killer/
on “EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020”Submitted The Illustrated Guide to a PhD as a story · 410 points
HN discussionCool. I was in the early stages of doing a userscript for gmail to do something like what you have here. All it does right now is filter out specific words/phrases I know I use too much, but I found some scripts that check for passive voice and "weasel words" that I want to incorporate. This is definitely cool. You may want to check this out, if you haven't seen it already: http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scrip…
Comment linking /articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/
on “Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear”Submitted Resolutions for programmers (2012) as a story · 369 points
HN discussionIt would be awesome if a "weasel words" highlighter or filter were to be added too. I have found that just removing some of these words from writing tends to have significant improvement in the clarity of writing. http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voi...
Comment linking /articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/
on “Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear”Submitted Translating math into code with examples in Java, Racket, Haskell, Python (2011) as a story · 358 points
HN discussionFor the hackers, I use write-good-mode in emacs to catch passive voice (which is based on some simple shell scripts[0]). I've heard good things about diction-mode, grammar-mode and artbollocks-mode. And of course flyspell. I find emacs very pleasing for writing text. I also use org-mode and it's LaTeX exporter extensively for publishing. Now if only it could integrate with text-fields in my browser... [0] http://mat…
Comment linking /articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/
on “Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear”Submitted The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. as a story · 319 points
HN discussionNo. http://matt.might.net/articles/counting-hash-collisions/
Comment linking /articles/counting-hash-collisions/
on “The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1”Submitted How to Get Tenure as a story · 308 points
HN discussionI wondered if someone would ask about that... It's just my own recollection from years ago when I looked at a bunch of CS curricula from public and private schools. There was a lot of patchy variation. If the topics were covered at all they'd typically be done in optional electives like a compilers course, or "theory of computation" course, taken in junior or senior years. Also depending on the school such an electi…
Comment linking /articles/what-cs-majors-should-know/
on “Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into”Submitted My PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash (2010) as a story · 257 points
HN discussionMatt Might's article is really good: http://matt.might.net/articles/intro-to-make/
Comment linking /articles/intro-to-make/
on “Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into”Submitted Shell scripts to improve your writing as a story · 219 points
HN discussionThis is such a great thread, I'm excited to begin reading quite a few of the linked blogs (such as this one: https://acoup.blog/ ). These ones are some of my favorites: - www.wall.org/~aron/blog/ (physics, theology, history, philosophy) - http://xahlee.info/ (math, emacs, keyboards, etc.) - https://matt.might.net/articles/ (academy, compsci, etc.) - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ (programming, companies, etc.) - ht…
Comment linking /articles/
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Advanced programming languages (2009) as a story · 219 points
HN discussionhttp://www.commandlinefanatic.com/cgi-bin/showpage.cgi?page=... is good deep dive into various topics. Enjoy the gzip explaination Matt might's 'blog' https://matt.might.net/articles/ is good read about various functional ideas and others https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview funny post about how complicated balancing a binary tree could be https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/archive.html some interst…
Comment linking /articles/
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Easy Ways to Fail a Ph.D. as a story · 205 points
HN discussionWhat's even more cool? Before long computers will be able to conceptualize the whole complex mess. Consider how we acquire knowledge (perhaps like http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ ). The more we've learned, the more we need to know about how to learn. At each level of knowledge we gain knowledge by accessing new knowledge and combining it with what we know. Eventually the supply of new knowledg…
Comment linking /articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
on “You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?”Submitted How to send and reply to email as a story · 175 points
HN discussionThis article is aimed towards students. It's great advice for students who are in college, know very little, and want to improve their CS skills. It's poor advice for someone who already has a STEM degree and wants to build something useful and profitable. If you already know how these things work, your time is better spent on the "edge of the circle": http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ which app…
Comment linking /articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
on “More challenging projects every programmer should try”Submitted Hacking strength: Gaining muscle with least resistance as a story · 173 points
HN discussion
