Top all-time · #293
ridiculous_fish
Personal blog · ridiculousfish.com/blogprogrammingsystems
ridiculous_fish is a personal blog at ridiculousfish.com about programming and systems. Since 2008, 172 different Hacker News readers have linked it 254 times, most often “The Treacherous Optimization (2006)”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 15 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link ridiculous_fish's blog, especially "The Treacherous Optimization" (old age and treachery) on why GNU grep is fast, and its other performance, division and C-optimization posts.
- Recommended for · 15 comments
- "Always worth reading", "great post", "very interesting", "fun", "a favorite", "classic", "fascinating".
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 Treacherous Optimization (2006)24 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2012-04-14
- Our arrays aren't (2005)16 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2012-03-07
- The Treacherous Optimization (2006)14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2018-11-18
- Will It Optimize? (2010)11 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2011-10-08
- HexFiend - A fast and clever open source hex editor for Mac OS X9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2009-07-31
- Faster Unsigned Division by Constants (2011)8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2011-10-20
- Faster than grep? Old age and treachery beat youth and skill every time.8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2009-02-05
- Fish: Finally, a command line shell for the 90s6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2012-06-06
- Cocoa's NSMutableArray changes implementation based on the size of the dataset6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2010-04-16
- /blog/posts/array.html5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-09-25
What Hacker News says?
Better or worse kludges than this one? http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/roundy.html
Comment linking /blog/posts/roundy.html
on “A first look at Unreal Engine 5”Submitted "Asswipe," replied Yahoo's server. That's when I knew I had it as a story · 573 points
HN discussionNot updated on a daily basis, but always worth reading: http://antirez.com/ https://danluu.com/ http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/ https://rachelbythebay.com/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: What are some good technology blogs to follow?”Submitted Fish: Finally, a command line shell for the 90s as a story · 442 points
HN discussionA couple of my favorite blogs - http://antirez.com/ - https://martin.kleppmann.com/archive.html - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing - https://ma.tt/ - https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/ - https://jvns.ca/ - https://www.johndcook.com/blog - http://feross.org/ - https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/ - https://blog.andrewcantino.com/ - https://nickcraver.com/blog/ - https://blog.acolyer.org - https://blog.coding…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted My least favorite Rust type as a story · 380 points
HN discussionMeh, yet another grep tool.... wait, by burntsushi! Whenever I hear of someone wanting to improve grep I think of the classic ridiculous fish piece[0]. But when I saw that this one was by the author of rust's regex tools, which I know from a previous post on here, are quite sophisticated, I perked up. Also, the tool aside, this blog post should be held up as the gold standard of what gets posted to hacker news: deta…
Comment linking /blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.html
on “Ripgrep – A new command line search tool”Submitted Will it optimize? as a story · 357 points
HN discussionThe best blogs don't have daily content. In fact, the best blogs usually post once a month, or less - often much less. Here are some: http://prog21.dadgum.com http://www.moserware.com http://ridiculousfish.com/blog http://wingolog.org/
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted Benchmarking division and libdivide on Apple M1 and Intel AVX512 as a story · 278 points
HN discussionHere's an article about how NSArray on MacOS does something similar: https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/array.html In the sense of swapping the underlying implementation as the number of items in the collection increases.
Comment linking /blog/posts/array.html
on “Rust is now overall faster than C in benchmarks”Submitted Fish shell 2.0 as a story · 272 points
HN discussionLots of good tricks, though I replaced a lot of them with "Use fish instead of bash" http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/
Comment linking /shell/
on “Unix tricks”Submitted Faster than grep? Old age and treachery beat youth and skill every time. as a story · 226 points
HN discussionWhat a charming and informative website! So refreshing to see an original design instead of another Wordpress, etc. site. Check out this fascinating note on how grep manages to be so fast by being secretly slow: http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.h...
Comment linking /blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.html
on “"Asswipe," replied Yahoo's server. That's when I knew I had it”Submitted Will It Optimize? (2010) as a story · 177 points
HN discussionstill haven't found it, but this is a pretty cool blog http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/my-one-lame-steve-story...
Comment linking /blog/posts/my-one-lame-steve-story.html
on “"Asswipe," replied Yahoo's server. That's when I knew I had it”Submitted The app that was fixed by a crash as a story · 169 points
HN discussionSeems to be down -- nyud cache here http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/YahooChatRooms.html?dis...
Comment linking /blog/posts/YahooChatRooms.html?display=1.nyud.net
on “"Asswipe," replied Yahoo's server. That's when I knew I had it”Submitted The One Second Dash as a story · 135 points
HN discussionEverybody should read the great post "The Treacherous Optimization" about `grep` at http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2006/05/30/old-age-a... .
Comment linking /blog/archives/2006/05/30/old-age-and-treachery/
on “Why GNU grep is Fast”Submitted Will It Optimize? as a story · 132 points
HN discussion"Old age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time." http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.h...
Comment linking /blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.html
on “Why GNU grep is fast (2010)”Submitted Go Bloviations as a story · 124 points
HN discussionhttps://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery....
Comment linking /blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.html
on “Why GNU grep is fast (2010)”Submitted Fish 2.0 shell beta as a story · 108 points
HN discussionSee also “The Treacherous Optimization (2006)”: http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.h...
Comment linking /blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.html
on “Why GNU grep is fast (2010)”Submitted Will It Optimize? See how well you can anticipate gcc's optimizer (2010) as a story · 98 points
HN discussionFirstly, wants wrong with being “the C# of Apple”? I think they wanted a language that can coexist with objective-C libraries, and is reasonably memory-efficient (adding RAM to phones decreases battery life) that they could control, and created it. They certainly didn’t just make run-of-the mill choices for all language features. Some non-standard design choices they made (for better or for worse): - Reference count…
Comment linking /blog/posts/array.html
on “Swift System Is Now Open Source”Submitted HexFiend - A fast and clever open source hex editor for Mac OS X as a story · 74 points
HN discussion
