Top all-time · #163
Oleg Kiselyov
Personal blog · okmij.orgprogrammingphilosophy
Oleg Kiselyov writes This FTP site, a personal blog at okmij.org about programming and philosophy. Since 2007, 252 different Hacker News readers have linked it 410 times, most often “An argument against call/cc (2012)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 13 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Oleg Kiselyov's personal site of essays and papers on functional programming, continuations, Haskell, OCaml and Scheme. HN readers link it as a rabbit hole and for examples that unlock concepts in a few lines of code.
- Recommended for · 13 comments
- Called 'amazing', 'awesome', 'astounding' and a favourite; one commenter says reading it feels superhuman.
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?
- An argument against call/cc (2012)18 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2012-08-09
- I'm not sure who this Oleg person is, but he sure has some cool links on his site.15 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2008-06-25
- Monadic I/O and Unix shell programming (2001)12 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2008-12-07
- What polymorphism and garbage collection have in common (2013)9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2013-03-08
- Freer Monads, More Extensible Effects [pdf]8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2015-09-29
- /ftp/continuations/against-callcc.html8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2022-01-25
- Subtyping, Subclassing, and Trouble with OOP7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2008-12-05
- /ftp/Scheme/SXML.html7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2007-09-28
- BER MetaOCaml7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-01-10
- Streams and Iteratees7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2010-05-22
What Hacker News says?
And then you have http://okmij.org/ftp/ , S/N ratio : NaN
Comment linking /ftp/
on “The Website Obesity Crisis”Submitted A dream of an ultimate OS (1995) as a story · 246 points
HN discussionOlegs tarpit: http://okmij.org/ftp/
Comment linking /ftp/
on “Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole?”Submitted How the OCaml type checker works (2022) as a story · 219 points
HN discussionOleg used to post things like this on Usenet: http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/macros.html#dirty-macros
Comment linking /ftp/Scheme/macros.html
on “QuickJS JavaScript Engine”Submitted Compilers: Incrementally and Extensibly (2024) as a story · 143 points
HN discussionI get a similar "is this by some kind of super-human intelligence?" feeling reading stuff from Oleg Kiselyov. http://okmij.org/ftp/
Comment linking /ftp/
on “QuickJS JavaScript Engine”Submitted Higher-kinded bounded polymorphism in OCaml (2021) as a story · 141 points
HN discussionThere's nothing to be done at the OS level, because the OS doesn't know which things are secret and which things aren't. You can sandbox the Django process (and to a certain extent Facebook were doing this at an even higher level, by having the whole server on a separate VLAN that was (supposedly) away from the important stuff) but that only does so much because the process needs to have enough access to do whatever…
Comment linking /ftp/Computation/resource-aware-prog/region-io.pdf
on “Remote Code Execution on a Facebook server”Submitted Implementing and Understanding Type Classes (2014) as a story · 118 points
HN discussionHaskell and Ocaml, e.g. http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/typeclass.html .
Comment linking /ftp/Computation/typeclass.html
on “Toward Go 2”Submitted Rethinking Prolog [pdf] as a story · 113 points
HN discussionhttp://dorophone.blogspot.com/ ;; elisp/picolisp stuff. monads, sexp, fexpr. inspiring. http://okmij.org/ftp/ ;; general cs ftw. too deep. http://john.freml.in/ ;; nice http server perf in clisp. http://www.learningclojure.com/ ;; get the most of clojure in terms of cpu cycles. refreshing. http://vanillajava.blogspot.com/ ;; perf, lo-level details about java. refreshing. btw, swegr ~= hacker ?
Comment linking /ftp/
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted I'm not sure who this Oleg person is, but he sure has some cool links on his site. as a story · 106 points
HN discussionOkay old man, show me your age and knowledge: do you know about Oleg Kiselyov and his amazing articles? See here: http://okmij.org/ftp/
Comment linking /ftp/
on “Most tech content is bullshit”Submitted Monads in Scheme as a story · 104 points
HN discussionUnix pipelines are indeed beautiful, especially when you consider its similarity to Haskell's monadic I/O: http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/monadic-shell.html Unix pipelines actually helped me make sense of Haskell's monad.
Comment linking /ftp/Computation/monadic-shell.html
on “The Beauty of Unix Pipelines”Submitted What polymorphism and garbage collection have in common (2013) as a story · 100 points
HN discussionGiven that your handle has "racket" in it, I'll assume that you're a call/cc kinda guy. Even if you're not, others may enjoy this argument against call/cc by Oleg: http://okmij.org/ftp/continuations/against-callcc.html Delimited continuations are a huge improvement over undelimited ones, but still, by themselves, any kind of continuations feel like (to me) the GOTOs of functional programming. More recently, people a…
Comment linking /ftp/continuations/against-callcc.html
on “Callbacks as our Generation's Goto Statement”Submitted Non-determinism: a sublanguage rather than a monad as a story · 97 points
HN discussionThis approach to mobile code in functional languages has been tried repeatedly since the 1990s. > each function is identified by a hash of its AST. That encoding for mobile code only works if the expression has no free variables (i.e. is closed). It turns out that it is surprisingly difficult to write code which you can be sure has no free variables at particular points (the "send this code to another machine for ex…
Comment linking /ftp/ML/MetaOCaml.html
on “Static torrent website with peer-to-peer queries over BitTorrent on 2M records”Submitted Freer Monads, More Extensible Effects (2015) [pdf] as a story · 94 points
HN discussionsyntax-rules macros can break hygiene: http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/macros.html#dirty-macros
Comment linking /ftp/Scheme/macros.html
on “John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language”Submitted An argument against call/cc (2012) as a story · 76 points
HN discussionOleg Kiselyov on functional programming http://okmij.org/ftp/
Comment linking /ftp/
on “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”Submitted Monadic I/O and Unix shell programming (2001) as a story · 75 points
HN discussionOleg Kiselyov works for the U.S Navy. Don't think he was available. His essays on programming and computation are examples of an astounding mind - http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/
Comment linking /ftp/Computation/
on “Dart language”Submitted Free and Freer Monads: Putting Monads Back into Closet as a story · 72 points
HN discussionMy favorite example is http://okmij.org/ftp/ Quite beautiful.
Comment linking /ftp/
on “A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC”Submitted Backtracking, Interleaving, and Terminating Monad Transformers (2005) [pdf] as a story · 71 points
HN discussion
