Bill de hÓra
dehora.net · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Bill de hÓra, a software engineer, writes about programming languages, APIs, engineering leadership, and working with AI agents.
What HN saysCommenters cite his posts on efficient API paging and on Go as examples of technical writing.
16HN people shared it
2linked it in comments
15stories submitted
275story points
4 months agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1On Go2 people · 147 points · first shared 2013 · 145 comments on HN
- 2On Scala2 people · 112 points · first shared 2013 · 99 comments on HN
- 3Working with agents doesn't feel like flow1 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 4REST as an engineering discipline1 people · 2 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 5Reasoning about Leverage in Engineering Organisations – Bill de hÓra1 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 6Patterns of Web Architecture1 people · 1 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 7What a DVCS gets you (maybe)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 8Git the inevitable?1 people · 1 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 9Tail Scale1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 10I Use Org Mode1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 11Python v Ruby Celebrity Deathmatch1 people · 1 points · first shared 2007 · discussion on HN
- 12Modelwerk: Neural Networks as Machinery1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 13Find a rank order list of your most popular command line calls1 people · 1 points · first shared 2008 · 2 comments on HN
- 14Agentic Engineering: Building Without Writing1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 15Efficient api paging count down not up1 people · first shared 2009
What HN people wrote when they linked it
blasdel · 2010-11-16
Except that the technical limitations favor correct pagination — it's perfectly cacheable unlike the idiotic model: http://www.dehora.net/journal/2008/07/20/efficient-api-paging-count-do…
I think the true reason is really just pervasive ignorance — everybody royally fucks this up and doesn't question it for a second.
If you have N items with M on each page, and the same request for 'page 2' always returns items N-M through N-2M, with the contents shuffling off the end as N increases, you're an abject failure. SELECT … LIMIT M OFFSET N-(P-1)•M is in almost every single web app and totally bullshit. It's incredibly depressing, but we'll probably be stuck with it for at least the rest of our lifetimes.
davidw · 2013-06-02
> this article is about technology
Not, it is not. Here are some articles about technology:
http://www.brython.info/
http://dehora.net/journal/2013/06/01/on-go/
http://ninjasandrobots.com/three-mistakes-i-see-web-designers-make-ove…
http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/51904590190/processing-and-racket
The article this discussion is about is entirely about politics and economics, as is the resultant discussion. You will note that there is no discussion of "oh, if only there were technology to fix that problem". There is, and it was not employed in this case. Why it wasn't, and the consequences, are what the article is about.
> But I have to agree, that sadly there is a correlation between the low level of discussion and how political a topic is.
Anyone can comment on political articles, whereas it actually takes some interest and experience to discuss the relative merits of Ruby and Python, or Akka and Erlang.