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Marginalia

marginalia.nu

You may be looking for one of the following things 🔗 Search Engine 🔗 Encyclopedia (not mobile-friendly!) 🔗 Website Explorerimproved 🔗 Similar Website Finder 🔗 Server Status My name is Viktor. I’m a Swedish software engineer and hypertext enjoyer. Marginalia is a website I’ve built. It’s really almost a bunch of…

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Visit marginalia.nu → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jun 2023 – Jul 2026

Web & Frontend 5Life, Learning & Writing 5Databases & Data 4Society, Policy & Culture 3Software Engineering 3Systems & Performance 1

1

Full Time

I’m working on Marginalia Search full time. I left the office for the last time today, and it’s the strangest feeling. I’ve quit jobs, taken time off work, been laid off, but this is different from any of those things. This is deliberate. There’s a note of relief. I’ve essentially been working two pretty demanding…

2

Absurd Success

So… I’ve had the most unreal week of coding. Zero exaggeration, I’ve halved the RAM requirements of the search engine, removed the need to take the system offline during an upgrade, removed hard limits on how many documents can be indexed, and quadrupled soft limits on how many keywords can be in the corpus. It’s been…

3

Maybe you should learn something

You can learn new things. Pixel art, touch typing, 3d modelling, music, calligraphy, wood working, knitting, a language. Whatever is practical and calls to you, you can learn. In the long term, learning new things is fun and makes life richer in ways you can’t even imagine, and it’s a time investment that will pay…

4

Marginalia: 3 Years

It’s been three years since the inception of Marginalia Search, then a dinky experiment to find where the heck the cool Internet has gone, now my full time job. While there’s always things that can be improved, it’s fair to say the search engine has never worked as well as it does right now. A great number of…

5

Feynman's Garden

The best description of my problem solving process is the Feynman algorithm, which is sometimes presented as a joke where the hidden subtext is “be smart”, but I disagree. The “algorithm” is a surprisingly lucid description of how thinking works in the context of hard problems where the answer can’t simply be looked…