Top all-time · #1394
Will Crichton
Personal blog · willcrichton.net/notes · on HN as wcrichtonprogrammingscience
Will Crichton's personal blog at willcrichton.net covers programming and science. Since 2018, 50 different Hacker News readers have linked it 106 times, most often “A New Medium for Communicating Research on Programming Languages”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (20) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Will Crichton's blog for essays and notes on programming languages, type systems and Rust, and for his interactive scientific-writing work (Nota, Portable EPUBs).
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- Called one of a commenter's favourite essays (the Portable EPUBs post); another suggested the Nota interactive paper as worth a look.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 20 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- A New Medium for Communicating Research on Programming Languages11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2021-09-28
- Implementing a Type-safe printf in Rust4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-06-25
- Naming Conventions That Need to Die (2018)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-07-16
- Portable EPUBs4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-01-25
- What Is Systems Programming, Really?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-09-09
- Type-Level Programming in Rust3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-09-26
- Analyzing Data 180,000x Faster with Rust3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-10-20
- Rust: The New LLVM3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-07-03
- What is systems programming, really? (2018)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-06-30
- Type-directed metaprogramming in Rust2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-03-19
What Hacker News says?
I've been using Python for 15 years, and I also haven't gotten into Jupyter. I worked with some research scientists who used it, but even they ported their programs to plain text files in order to get version control with textual diffs (which is IMO better for collaboration.) One reason I don't use it is that I started doing data science before the Python ecosystem was viable -- before Pandas existed. I use R for da…
Comment linking /notes/programming-in-the-debugger/
on “Jupyter Receives the ACM Software System Award”Submitted Portable EPUBs as a story · 659 points
HN discussionThe author is a post-doc advised by Shriram Krishnamurthi [1], the author of Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation (PLAI), and one of the authors of Data-Centric Introduction to Computing (DCIC). I am currently reading both PLAI and DCIC and I am truly delighted by the minute care the authors have put into making the books pedagogical works of art. That's true love! [1] https://willcrichton.net/
Comment linking /
on “Portable EPUBs”Submitted The Future of Notebooks: Lessons from JupyterCon as a story · 353 points
HN discussionThe article is a WASM EPUB viewer. There's a link shown in the viewer to the EPUB file: https://willcrichton.net/notes/portable-epubs/epubs/portable...
Comment linking /notes/portable-epubs/epubs/portable-epubs.epub
on “Portable EPUBs”Submitted What Is Systems Programming, Really? as a story · 248 points
HN discussionI haven't used it myself, but my understanding as an outsider is that a lot of the excitement around Rust is that it's bringing a new model of memory safety: with the borrow-checker, you can avoid the performance penalties of garbage collection, while also avoiding the bugs and security risks seen in C. People who care about such things are really hyped because it's a truly new idea in a mainstream(ish) language. ht…
Comment linking /notes/rust-memory-safety/
on “Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help”Submitted Gradual Programming as a story · 133 points
HN discussionI tend to agree with the premise of this article -- that [HTML is underutilized as a medium for disseminating scientific writing]. Some recent work related to this done by Will Crichton: https://willcrichton.net/nota/ https://willcrichton.net/notes/portable-epubs/
Comment linking /notes/portable-epubs/
on “Reactive HTML Notebooks”Submitted Type-Level Programming in Rust as a story · 130 points
HN discussionhttps://table.dog (a CLI to download Stripe to SQLite). I considered Node.js, C#. I went with Rust for a few reasons: - Easy to build small portable binaries (as a primary language feature). - The type checker ensures type consistency when writing out to SQL tables (SQLite is loosely typed). Code that reads from the SQLite database implicitly benefits from Rusts strong type checks. - Macros to convert structs to SQL…
Comment linking /notes/rust-the-new-llvm/
on “Rust 1.63”Submitted What Is Systems Programming, Really? (2018) as a story · 130 points
HN discussionGreat article. One nitpick: > One of the biggest benefits of using a systems programming language is the ability to have control over low-level details. I think this is a misguided conflation of "systems programming" and "low-level programming", those are separate things. See http://willcrichton.net/notes/systems-programming/
Comment linking /notes/systems-programming/
on “What is Rust and why is it so popular?”Submitted Implementing a Type-safe printf in Rust as a story · 119 points
HN discussionMy personal site ( https://willcrichton.net/ ), lab site ( https://cel.cs.brown.edu/ ), and Mastodon page ( https://mastodon.social/@tonofcrates ) are all good ways to follow me!
Comment linking /
on “Flowistry: An IDE plugin for Rust that focuses on relevant code”Submitted Programming in the Debugger as a story · 117 points
HN discussion> Now these explanations are just in the paragraph next to the equation and are not limited to 3 words. Not necessarily. Will Crichton, a PhD student at Stanford University, has been working on a tool called Nota [0] that he's hoping might serve as a platform for online paper publication. I'd suggest checking out the initial presentation of Nota [1] to see some ideas of how syntax highlighting-type effects can be ma…
Comment linking /nota/
on “Annotated equations for increased readability and understanding of papers”Submitted Compiling Knowledge into Probabilistic Models as a story · 68 points
HN discussionWill Chrichton at Stanford Uni argued for targeting Rust rather than LLVM to get the benefits of a safer intermediate language and a standard library for free. It is interesting to consider the trade-offs even if you go with C or LLVM: https://willcrichton.net/notes/rust-the-new-llvm/
Comment linking /notes/rust-the-new-llvm/
on “So you want to design a programming language (2017)”Submitted Memory Safety in Rust: A Case Study with C as a story · 65 points
HN discussionI'm targeting people who are writing documents: bloggers, academics, textbook writers, that sort of thing. Certainly Nota requires a level of technical expertise to use right now, but I have a WYSIWYG editor as a distant-future TODO. If you read my original paper about Nota, you can find a more interesting set of applications: https://willcrichton.net/nota/
Comment linking /nota/
on “Nota: A Document Language for the Browser”Submitted “Do What I Mean”: Name Resolution in Programming Languages as a story · 36 points
HN discussionMy original paper on the system shows some more interesting examples, such as logical inference rules that can toggle between natural language and mathematical symbols: https://willcrichton.net/nota/ I'll be adding an "Examples" page with more interesting content soon. The reason for using React is that it provides a nice model for components that encapsulate state and interactivity, so a user can just write "@Compo…
Comment linking /nota/
on “Nota: A Document Language for the Browser”Submitted What is systems programming, really? (2018) as a story · 33 points
HN discussionTangential to the algorithm itself, this is about naming: > Fenwick trees, also known as binary indexed trees Every time I read something like this, I'm reminded of https://willcrichton.net/notes/naming-conventions-that-need-... . "Fenwick tree" makes it seem like some unknown strange entity, while "binary indexed tree" immediately makes it a lot more accessible and gives you a better handle on the concept too.
Comment linking /notes/naming-conventions-that-need-to-die/
on “You could have invented Fenwick trees”Submitted Idioms of Dynamic Languages as a story · 28 points
HN discussionI think you might be interesting in this interactive papar: https://willcrichton.net/nota/
Comment linking /nota/
on “Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics”Submitted Portable EPUBs as a story · 26 points
HN discussionThough it barely mentions security https://willcrichton.net/notes/portable-epubs/ is one of my favorite essays to be posted to HN in awhile https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138042 I wonder how one would measure the costs and benefits (with a focus on security) of speeding up and making more security-driven the gargantuan task of shifting to a better, well, portable document format. People are thinking big and…
Comment linking /notes/portable-epubs/
on “Insecure Features in PDFs (2021)”Submitted Partial Function Application as a Design Pattern as a story · 16 points
HN discussion
