commaok
commaok.xyz · Personal blog · on HN since 2017
An engineer writing about Go, RISC-V and small software tools, including binary size tricks and why finished software should stay finished.
What HN saysHN commenters mostly discuss its post on Hugo and software being done, and note that the www subdomain serves the wrong SSL certificate.
25HN people shared it
12linked it in comments
19stories submitted
346story points
3 months agolast shared
2017people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Sometimes Software Is Done, or Why Hugo Why (2024)4 people · 80 points · first shared 2024 · 76 comments on HN
- 2Just in Time Software3 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 3Integer log10: make your lookup table do more (2021)3 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 4Homepage3 people · first shared 2020
- 5Life without line numbers for 6% smaller Go binaries2 people · 96 points · first shared 2020 · 92 comments on HN
- 6Nicer struct literals in Go templates2 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 7Simpler Backoff1 people · 132 points · first shared 2025 · 45 comments on HN
- 8What happens when you load into x0 on RISC-V?1 people · 16 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Security Through Intentional Redundancy1 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 10Of Manners and Machines1 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 11Performance and Files Full of Code1 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 12Go 1.13 can report custom metrics from within your benchmarks1 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 13Logging, interfaces, and allocation1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 14Fight Fire with Pedantry1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 15Benchmarking package initialization in Go1 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
stevekemp · 2020-07-22
There's an error for https://www.commaok.xyz/, for what that's worth.
SPBS · 2024-10-13
Sometimes Software is Done, or Why Hugo Why (2024)
https://commaok.xyz/post/on_hugo/
> When I first used Hugo I loved it. It was fast. It was simple. It just worked, as much as any software does, and it solved a real problem.
> It was done.
> But people kept working on it.
> I’m sure that it has been improved in countless ways. But along the way it has gotten bigger and more complicated, and has broken backwards compatibility repeatedly.
rnotaro · 2020-07-21
His browser might have oppened the following link: https://www.commaok.xyz/post/no-line-numbers/ somehow.
It's serving a certificate for github.com.
donmcronald · 2020-07-21
It's fine for me and was issued May 26. The URL when I visited was https://commaok.xyz
sli · 2020-07-21
The www subdomain serves the wrong cert. https://www.commaok.xyz/ gives you an SSL error but https://commaok.xyz/ does not.
lukasschwab · 2026-07-21
The title is a reference back to "Is Claude Code a Compiler?" by the same author, linked from the first sentence: https://commaok.xyz/ai/is-claude-a-compiler/
And then claim is attributed right there:
> The hands-down highlight was the talk by Erik Schluntz: Vibe coding in prod.
> Among other things, he drew an analogy between LLMs and compilers.
skybrian · 2026-05-16
Who wants to deal with YAML? Sometimes the easiest way to set up a VM is by talking to your phone:
https://commaok.xyz/ai/just-in-time-software/
I mean, I don't do that, but I'll type a prompt.
kassner · 2025-05-31
Offtopic, but huge respect for this[1]:
> Lots of people don’t want to read about AI.
> I respect that.
> But I’m currently steeped in the world of AI, for better or for worse, and I want to blog about it. So I’ve split this blog in half.
> The normal blog, which you are reading, is now AI-free.
> There’s another, at /ai that contains only AI posts. It has its own RSS feed.
Thank you. It (non-AI) definitely goes to my RSS reader.
1: https://commaok.xyz/post/blog-schism/
jabs · 2024-10-25
100% agreed.
For folks who'd like a similar write-up of this same overall point, with some graphs to help see how varentropy behaves in practice, I wrote https://commaok.xyz/post/entropix/
meblum · 2024-10-08
Josh Snyder wrote a nice rant a while ago about updating Hugo. https://commaok.xyz/post/on_hugo/
openasocket · 2021-06-04
Awesome find! But I wonder how easily this could be extended to 64 bit integers? That sequence in the lookup table won't fit into 64 bits if it's extended. I think you would have to fall back to just having the lookup table storing the transition data, as described in https://commaok.xyz/post/lookup_tables/ in the "A Small Step" section. And probably add a conditional in the beginning to handle very large integers that would overflow. Alternatively you might be able to do something with two lookup tables, but I think at that point you've got enough lookup data that it would be less efficient.
benhoyt · 2021-03-11
I don't quite understand why you need the messy/unsafe string interning, instead of a simple (mutex-protected) map with the m[string(b)] optimization that avoids allocations, or josharian's sync.Pool approach? https://commaok.xyz/post/intern-strings/