Somehow my post from yesterday about Church numerals in Clojure hit the front page of Reddit briefly. I don't understand why. It wasn't that interesting. It was an interesting topic, but there are other sites with better information about the topic. (Even Wikipedia has more/better info. This one is nice too in spite of being C#.)

I think it's because it was submitted to Reddit with a vague and inflammatory title about brain explosions, and people click links without thinking too much about what they're doing. Even programmers do, I guess.

My blog got around 14,000 visits yesterday, which is not much these days, but a lot by the standards of my tiny blog. If you added up everyone I ever had a conversation with in real life, would it be 14,000 people? I doubt it. Kind of crazy.

I run three websites out of one JVM/Clojure instance on my lowly VPS server and it didn't crash, so I'm kind of happy about that. I've crashed from lesser loads than that in the past. So either my programming is getting better, or my new host is better than my old one, or it was dumb luck.

All of my data is persisted in Tokyo Cabinet nowadays but mostly it's read from caches in Clojure refs, so maybe that helped a bit too. Maybe. Who knows? I know nothing about scaling websites. Slashdot would reduce this site to a puddle of goo.

In any case I appreciate the opportunity to blather about things and have people listen.

I always know when something from my blog has been posted to Reddit, because I wake up and I have dozens more comments than I'd ever get otherwise, 90% of which are calling me an idiot.

I get a kick out of it though. People so take everything so seriously, and can't recognize hyperbole when they see it. It's amazing how quickly a straw man can be constructed and demolished in the course of a reader's short comment. In all seriousness, people would do well to remember that you generally infer can't infer much of anything about a person's character or intelligence or beliefs by reading one blog post they made on their cow-website.

Easiest way to increase traffic to your blog: Write up a post insulting something, e.g. a programming language or text editor. Use deliberately weak arguments, but not TOO weak. Float enough truth in it to make it plausible. The internet justice avengers will descend upon your blog like rabid wolves, because no one can resist pointing out when someone else is wrong on the internet. I don't write posts like that (not on purpose anyways) but the temptation is always there.