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To me the definition of literate programming is much less interesting than the spirit: for complicated logic / parts of code, I try to take the reader through the whole top-down plan / approach, as if it’s a story I’m writing to my colleagues about what’s going on and why. In those parts of code I can easily have 10 times as much lines of comments than code, but it’s important to use it sparingly: people tend to start to ignore comments if they’re low value. But it’s much more effective to have good comments than external documentation, as external documentation has a tendency to go out sync with the code.

As with most things, don’t be dogmatic.


> As with most things, don’t be dogmatic.

It depends. If you want to learn faster, you should be dogmatic: "In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister." If you want to become a better programmer, please do set extra challenges (fe pure lazy functional progamming only, pure literate programming, ...)


That’s true, I was mostly referring to it in a professional setting, not for educational purposes.

Brendan Gregg is somewhat of a systems engineering legend and contributed more to the field than most people could dream of.

Is his post self promotion? Yeah, probably.

Does it matter and do the top 3 comments on HN be salty about that? Probably not that useful.


[flagged]


You are tired, but you still read, still commented (or worse, commented but didn’t read).

I always give people benefits of the doubt. He posted it on his personal blog, going back so many years. Most of his content are technical in nature, the kind of things that would never be on the front page of HN.


the fact that he posted in his personal blog doesn't change the fact that for many of us this is corporate BS and should not be in the top of HN first page. If you disagree, upvote comments you like, don't try to be a moderator.

> Most of his content are technical in nature, the kind of things that would never be on the front page of HN.

That is exactly what many of us prefer to see, actually. The hacker part of hackernews, remember?


Yeah, I understand the responses, but this guy legit has a great track record.

And if you read between the lines (especially the last few), it seems like he had problems pushing certain initiatives of his forward within Intel.


Certainly if you take it in combination with his earlier "Intel is listening" blog post: https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-11-22/intel-is-listen...

Cloudflare Zero-Trust is also very core to their enterprise business.

I also don’t think it’s actually tail call optimization, but rather an “unrecurser”.

I’m also not convinced that this actually is worth the effort, considering it’s doing runtime rewriting of Python using Python.


Certain function calls that were unable to be run in Python can now be run. From that perspective, my thinking was that this was a net good since one can preserve the "clean syntax" from recursion while still being able to access the performance benefits of an iterative solution.

It's a suboptimal implementation but it's interesting for the purpose of transpiling something like Scheme or ML or maybe Purescript to Python.

Historically, suggestions to make Python tail recursive were rejected on the theory that the added stack frames helped debugging, and that Python was supposed to be an imperative language. But it has been dragged into supporting some FP idioms over the years and that has seemed like a good thing.


Wasn’t there something going on with an internal battle between two content leads, one focused on “lots of content” and the other on higher quality, more risky bets (that lead to Squid Games, Ozark, Stranger Things, etc), and the one doing the higher quality content ended up losing.

I am convinced they’re hyper focused on the wrong metrics, and don’t take long term retention into consideration.


While I don't know, that sound plausible. Netflix can make incredibly technically beautiful shows, but that's getting cheaper and cheaper to do. Good writing is expensive and combined with data suggesting that people mostly look at their phone while watching their shows, why even bother making something with a complex and interesting plot.

I wonder if it’s a matter of the platforms optimizing for the wrong metrics, or whether people just stopped paying for quality.

It's hard to motivate high quality at high cost on subscription based platforms. We all pay the same price regardless of whether the content is barely palatable or great, and we all want new content frequently.

Better then to pump out a wide range of mediocracy to attract and keep as many subscribers as possible.


As a matter of fact, unless you’re increasing redundancy, stacking multiple different vendors on top of each other will only increase the chances of things going down.

“haha rust is bad” or something, is’s a silly take. these things hardly, if ever, are due to programming language choice and rather due to complicated interactions between different systems.

They explicitly give you a discount if you opt in to allowing your data to be used for (anonymized) analytics. That’s pretty fair imho.

Cynical take: they could look at everyone and give a discount for optics.

I'd feel a lot better if "OpenRouter" were open source.


litellm is basically open source version https://www.litellm.ai although the openrouter being a hosted service is kinda the point. Unless the whole industry decides to this over e2ee you cant get any guarantees about an intermediary aggregator

Nobody is forcing you to use it. It’s a service for convenience: you just pay one provider instead of having to create a bazillion accounts.

If you don’t like any middle men, just go to one of the providers directly.


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