Top all-time · #1695
Thorsten Ball
Personal blog · thorstenball.com/blog · on HN as misternuggetprogramming
Thorsten Ball's personal blog at thorstenball.com covers programming. Since 2014, 42 different Hacker News readers have linked it 70 times, most often “Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks (2014)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Thorsten Ball's blog and book pages on Unix processes, fork-based multiprocessing and compilers. His Unicorn writeup and his programming books are the pieces commenters recommend most.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Unicorn fork/Unix writeup called one of the most informative pieces and a must-read; books called great and a good starting point; blog called excellent.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks (2014)6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2017-06-30
- How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-09-08
- Professional Programming: The First 10 Years5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-05-17
- What I believe about the future of software development5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-09-20
- The Tools I Use to Write Books4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-09-04
- What I didn't do to write a book3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-01-16
- Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-04-09
- Typing can be the bottleneck (2020)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-09-01
- A Virtual Brainfuck Machine in Go (2017)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-01-04
- The context in which we build software2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-15
What Hacker News says?
One mini-feature I really like: authors highlighting their own favorite or popular articles. I think I saw it first on Julia Evans' blog ( https://jvns.ca/categories/favorite/ ). I also added it to mine ( https://thorstenball.com/blog/ ) and found the exercise of going through the posts and tagging them very enjoyable.
Comment linking /blog/
on “Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites”Submitted Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them as a story · 602 points
HN discussionMiscellaneous technical stuff: - https://danluu.com/ - https://blog.jessfraz.com/ - https://adamwathan.me/ - https://jvns.ca/ - https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ - https://dankim.org/ - https://mtlynch.io/ - https://rgz.ee/ - https://markdotto.com/ - https://thorstenball.com/ - https://sarahdrasnerdesign.com/writing/ - https://lukesmith.xyz/ - Quirky minimalist linux & free software stuff. I don't agree with many of his…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020) as a story · 552 points
HN discussionI’ve not read this book, so can’t offer a comparison but Thorsten Ball’s two books [1] are great. The dragon book was my textbook in college, brings back memories, might be outdated but some concepts should still be useful. [1] https://thorstenball.com/books/
Comment linking /books/
on “Crafting Interpreters”Submitted The Tools I Use to Write Books as a story · 472 points
HN discussionReminds me of this author’s post on here a while back on the command line tools he used to write books... https://thorstenball.com/blog/2018/09/04/the-tools-i-use-to-...
Comment linking /blog/2018/09/04/the-tools-i-use-to-write-books/
on “How I make $400/month with my technical eBook”Submitted Writing an Interpreter in Go: The Paperback Edition as a story · 284 points
HN discussion> to handle the same number of requests/sec you need much more workers, which has a lot of overhead When doing multiprocessing, it's advisable to fork() instead of creating fresh processes (or launching them in containers etc). As long as you preload the necessary libraries/modules in the parent process before the fork, children will reference the same memory in a copy-on-write fashion. It keeps overhead extremely l…
Comment linking /blog/2014/11/20/unicorn-unix-magic-tricks/
on “PHP in 2020”Submitted How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020) as a story · 216 points
HN discussionMaybe check this bibliography [1] of "Resources for Amateur Compiler Writers"... although I'm not sure what's the "Amateur" part of it... it lists several text books and papers that would take anyone a few years to work through :-/ https://thorstenball.com/books/ seems like a good star, and if you don't know Go it shouldn't take too long to get acquainted with it. 1: http://c9x.me/compile/bib/
Comment linking /books/
on “Essentials of Programming Languages”Submitted Why I wrote a book about interpreters as a story · 213 points
HN discussionhttp://thorstenball.com/blog/2014/11/20/unicorn-unix-magic-t... is also a current story on HN. Just an example of how powerful that simple 70's Unix is. Allows features that appear "magical" to thorsten, anyway. Windows? Wasn't really even an option... until 20 years later. And, of course, Unix really isn't that good, either. But, before you ignore it, please come to feature parity, at least.
Comment linking /blog/2014/11/20/unicorn-unix-magic-tricks/
on “Systemd redux: The end of Linux”Submitted The Tools I Use to Write Books (2018) as a story · 170 points
HN discussionI find the flowchart visualizing the pipeline very intriguing, can someone link me a tool I can use to create similar charts? For reference: https://thorstenball.com/images/book_tool_pipeline.svg
Comment linking /images/book_tool_pipeline.svg
on “The Tools I Use to Write Books (2018)”Submitted Why threads can't fork as a story · 147 points
HN discussionThorsten Ball's writeup [1] on the architecture behind Unicorn is one of the single most informative pieces I've ever read about fork-based multiprocessing, signals, and pipe-based ipc. The information there can be applied to any platform and, imo, is a must-read for anyone operating in a *nix environment. [1] https://thorstenball.com/blog/2014/11/20/unicorn-unix-magic-...
Comment linking /blog/2014/11/20/unicorn-unix-magic-tricks/
on “Show HN: Compile Ruby to C”Submitted Professional Programming: The First 10 Years as a story · 131 points
HN discussionMy dear HN newbie, I have used more UNIXes in my life that you probably know about. Some education for you about fork(), https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3317550.3321435 https://thorstenball.com/blog/2014/10/13/why-threads-cant-fo...
Comment linking /blog/2014/10/13/why-threads-cant-fork/
on “JDK 20 and JDK 21: What We Know So Far”Submitted Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks as a story · 103 points
HN discussionMaybe this one? https://thorstenball.com/blog/2022/05/17/professional-progra...
Comment linking /blog/2022/05/17/professional-programming-the-first-10-years/
on “Ask HN: Help find old article on learnings of a Software Engineer”Submitted How I Prompt as a story · 70 points
HN discussionMost people are actually 10x programmers, 10x before they get it right. If they get there. Then there are the 1x, first-time-right, fearless programmers... Fearless as in https://thorstenball.com/blog/2022/05/17/professional-progra...
Comment linking /blog/2022/05/17/professional-programming-the-first-10-years/
on “The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer (2020)”Submitted Professional Programming: The First 10 Years as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI was reading on Thorsten Ball excellent blog https://thorstenball.com/blog/ and found he also gives great talks. This one explains unix ports, pipes, fork, processes etc very clearly and simply, and demonstrates their use outside shell scripts in ruby. (I hardly know ruby, but that didn't matter at all.)
Comment linking /blog/
on “Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks – ArrrrCamp 2014”Submitted How much do we bend to the will of our tools? as a story · 26 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Virtual Brainfuck Machine in Go (2017) as a story · 18 points
HN discussionSubmitted Where did fork go? as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSubmitted What I believe about the future of software development as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSubmitted How can you not be romantic about programming? as a story · 11 points
HN discussion
