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Mike’s blog
Personal blog · blog.plan99.netprogrammingsystems
Mike’s blog is a personal blog at blog.plan99.net about programming and systems. Since 2017, 86 different Hacker News readers have linked it 213 times, most often “Modern garbage collection”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 0 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mike Hearn's blog for technical takes on programming languages, garbage collection, and security, and for debunking academic claims about Twitter bots and replication studies.
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?
- Modern garbage collection11 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2017-02-20
- /the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f79 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2017-07-11
- Graal and Truffle (2016)7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2018-01-30
- Modern garbage collection: Part 27 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-06-09
- Mixing Node.js and OpenJDK6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-04-05
- Is Jigsaw good or is it wack?6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-04-16
- Pseudo-Epidemics: Why COVID-19 is guaranteed to never end5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-08-06
- It’s time to kill the web app5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-09-23
- In Defence of the Technical Interview4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-06-14
- Replication studies can't fix science3 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2024-10-06
What Hacker News says?
It is very refreshing to see this from a primarily technical angle. In common with many HN-ers, I actually did a lot of cryptocurrency and blockchain dev work 5+ years ago, and was actually very exited about it at first, before realising what was behind the curtains. It is a similar story with many early Bitcoin developers, including one famously describing it as an experiment that failed[0]. I also get the distinct…
Comment linking /the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7
on “My First Impressions of Web3”Submitted It’s time to kill the web app as a story · 1003 points
HN discussionReally not! This is a huge faceplant for writing things in Rust. If they had been writing their code in Java/Kotlin instead of Rust, this outage either wouldn't have happened at all (a failure to load a new config would have been caught by a defensive exception handler), or would have been resolved in minutes instead of hours. The most useful thing exceptions give you is not static compile time checking, it's the st…
Comment linking /what-s-wrong-with-exceptions-nothing-cee2ed0616
on “Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem”Submitted The science of Westworld as a story · 242 points
HN discussionIn that era JavaScript was also loaded with security issues. That's why browsers had to invest so much in kernel sandboxing. Securing JavaScript VMs written by hand in C++ is a dead end, although ironically given this post, it's easier when they're written in Java [1] But the reason Java is more secure than JavaScript in the context of supply chain attacks is fourfold: 1. Maven packages don't have install scripts. "…
Comment linking /why-not-capability-languages-a8e6cbdf9682
on “Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised”Submitted Re: Moxie on Web3 as a story · 209 points
HN discussion> Go has sub-millisecond GC pauses At the cost of throughput: > Go optimises for pause times as the expense of throughput to such an extent that it seems willing to slow down your program by almost any amount in order to get even just slightly faster pauses. - https://blog.plan99.net/modern-garbage-collection-911ef4f8bd...
Comment linking /modern-garbage-collection-911ef4f8bd8e
on “24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse”Submitted In Defence of the Technical Interview as a story · 191 points
HN discussionThe creator of this post is the same guy who said bitcoin was dead in 2016 [1]. [1] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
Comment linking /the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7
on “It’s time to kill the web app”Submitted What should follow the web? as a story · 167 points
HN discussionJava HotSpot's garbage collector is significantly better for most workloads than that of Go, because it takes throughput into account, not just latency. Mike Hearn makes the point at length in this article: https://blog.plan99.net/modern-garbage-collection-911ef4f8bd... I predict that over time Go's GC will evolve to become very similar to the modern GCs that Java HotSpot has. Not having generational GC was an inter…
Comment linking /modern-garbage-collection-911ef4f8bd8e
on “IT Runs on Java 8”Submitted Modern garbage collection: Part 2 as a story · 150 points
HN discussionIt's not really about Java giving exceptions a bad rap. After all exceptions are a feature of almost any OOP language designed after 1990 and they work nearly the same way in all of them. I've argued in the past that the reason the current crop of languages that compile to native code tend to avoid exceptions, is to do primarily with implementation cost, the backgrounds of the language designers and a mistaken attem…
Comment linking /what-s-wrong-with-exceptions-nothing-cee2ed0616
on “Go 2 Draft Designs”Submitted Building account systems as a story · 138 points
HN discussionIt's harder than it looks. I wrote an essay exploring why here: https://blog.plan99.net/why-not-capability-languages-a8e6cbd...
Comment linking /why-not-capability-languages-a8e6cbdf9682
on “We all dodged a bullet”Submitted An obscure research project could accelerate innovation in language design as a story · 133 points
HN discussionYour knowledge is out of date: Windows has supported capabilities from the start of NT and does run a lot drivers in isolated processes, along with most OS services. It has done for years. It has the most sophisticated IPC framework of any OS (DCOM) which is integrated with the operating system kernel's security frameworks, and used pervasively both internally and by apps. And Microsoft has created a new way to writ…
Comment linking /why-not-capability-languages-a8e6cbdf9682
on “'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees”Submitted Kotlin doesn’t need an LLVM backend (2016) as a story · 80 points
HN discussionI recently stumbled on an announcement for Graal and Truffle in my bookmarks: https://blog.plan99.net/graal-truffle-134d8f28fb69 discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13343845 The idea there: "Graal is a research compiler. ... Truffle is a framework for implementing languages using nothing more than a simple abstract syntax tree interpreter." As a bonus, you get high speed, good instrumentation for debug…
Comment linking /graal-truffle-134d8f28fb69
on “GraalVM: Run Programs Faster Anywhere”Submitted Why not object capability languages? as a story · 78 points
HN discussionThe idea that viruses always grow exponentially until they reach total saturation of the population comes from mathematical models that have never successfully modelled any real epidemic, ever. It doesn't come from experience of real diseases in nature, many of which were predicted by epidemiologists to grow to enormous proportions and yet - even in the absence of control measures - that isn't what happens. It seems…
Comment linking /is-epidemiology-useful-a4ec54e59569
on “Coronavirus and Credibility”Submitted Modern garbage collection as a story · 44 points
HN discussionIt kinda needed suspension of disbelief, but not too much! I blogged at the start of 2017 a comparison of Westworld's hosts with what existed in the research literature at the time. Even got it reviewed by Alex Graves at DeepMind :) https://blog.plan99.net/the-science-of-westworld-ec624585e47
Comment linking /the-science-of-westworld-ec624585e47
on “Muse Spark 1.3”Submitted Graal and Truffle (2016) as a story · 42 points
HN discussionThere are no armies of Twitter bots swaying mass public opinion. That's another nonsensical conspiracy theory of the sort of the New York Times has gone all-in on to try and explain how Trump won without having to engage with his policies or arguments. This article looks at just one news story+research paper alleging a Russian Twitter bot army swaying politics, but in the UK rather than the USA: https://blog.plan99.…
Comment linking /did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a
on “Resignation Letter”Submitted A summary of recent AI research (2016) as a story · 34 points
HN discussionSomewhat relevant: https://blog.plan99.net/kotlin-native-310ffac94af2#.ijzik0jx... Title says Kotlin, but it is about JVM languages going native, in general. Or should they?
Comment linking /kotlin-native-310ffac94af2
on “Scala Native v0.1”Submitted Pseudo-Epidemics: Why COVID-19 is guaranteed to never end as a story · 31 points
HN discussionThat's true for some kinds of research but a lot of academic output isn't as firm as "X creates Y". Replicability is overrated anyway. Loads of bad papers will replicate just fine if you try. They're still making false claims. https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...
Comment linking /replication-studies-cant-fix-science-0e195234a280
on “AI tools are spotting errors in research papers”Submitted Mixing Node.js and OpenJDK as a story · 10 points
HN discussion
