[HN Gopher] Carol's Causal Conundrum: a zine intro to causally o...
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       Carol's Causal Conundrum: a zine intro to causally ordered message
       delivery
        
       Author : evakhoury
       Score  : 38 points
       Date   : 2026-04-10 18:43 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (decomposition.al)
 (TXT) w3m dump (decomposition.al)
        
       | rapnie wrote:
       | Wow, it surprises me that there aren't more comments on this
       | zine, which I find a delightful way to present interesting CS
       | topics, detailed explanation and pages full of explanatory
       | drawings that speak. The Zines page [0] mentions the definition
       | of a zine:
       | 
       | > "a small-circulation print or online publication that is
       | produced through noncommercial means and is meant to appeal to a
       | niche audience"
       | 
       | So then, is "causally ordered message delivery", "introduction to
       | choreographic programming", and "Fighting Faults in Distributed
       | Systems" too niche for HN? Hand-crafted with human sweat and
       | tears, no AI. Is that the reason then perhaps for the silent
       | comment thread, i.e. TL;DP, "too long, doesn't prompt"?
       | 
       | [0] https://decomposition.al/zines/
        
         | vkou wrote:
         | I've read through ItCP. The illustrations were wonderful, but I
         | was rather annoyed by the typeface.
         | 
         | ... And somewhat disappointed by the conclusions. A Java
         | compiler (sans an overview of limitations/capabilities, but I
         | understand the limitations of the format), and a... Haskell
         | library, which, unfortunately, is incredibly irrelevant to me.
         | 
         | How is this subject approached in practice? I'm fairly familiar
         | with authentication (generally handed off to a bespoke service
         | + library that abstracts away most of this for the end
         | programmer), but my generalist experience with other
         | coordination problems between distributed systems is that
         | programmers tend to not be particularly rigorous about them -
         | and try their best to break down cross-service relationships to
         | very, very simple-to-implement-in-a-bespoke-fashion cases.
        
       | mindslight wrote:
       | On this topic, is anyone else bothered by the way most home
       | automation software uses MQTT? They splay messages out into
       | multiple semantically-significant topics, which is an
       | understandably attractive idea for writing simple scripts that
       | change when a variable changes and whatnot. But the MQTT spec
       | does not guarantee ordering across topics! So this has a
       | correctness problem with only two devices communicating, never
       | mind three.
        
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       (page generated 2026-04-14 23:00 UTC)