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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,970 posts.

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2026
5793

I love email (2023)

I constantly hear about how much everybody hates email. Look, I receive just as many spam messages and useless email-based notifications and stuffy vapid “regarding my previous email” work messages as the next gal. I get it. But I’ve found there’s something magical about email as a medium of communication, and as a…

5796

Do Babies Dream of Baby Sheep?

This is my submission for the June 2026 IndieWeb Carnival. The theme is “No way!?”, hosted by Alex Hsu. It is widely known that people don’t remember the first 1-3 years of their childhood, only have episodic memory at 3-6 years old, and only after those first 5-6 years we start to form autobiographical memories. So…

5800

Redefining Go Functions

I once wrote a Perl subroutine that would memoize the subroutine that called it. That much was useful, but then it inserted a copy of itself into the caller, so that its callers would be memoized too. A well-placed call to aggressively_memoize could back-propagate to the whole codebase, spreading functional purity…

5801

Making a vintage LLM from scratch

In this blog post, I will share the adventures I had creating my own LLM, from (almost) scratch, trained only on old texts. I made my own base-training and fine-tuning scripts, data processing pipelines and custom datasets. ("almost from scratch" means I did use existing programming languages and libraries, I didn't…

5805

An NSFW filter for Marginalia search

… optional, that is. I’ve been working on an NSFW filter for Marginalia Search, as that is something some people have asked for, primarily API consumers. The search engine has had some domain based filtering for a while, based on the UT1 lists, but that isn’t a very comprehensive approach. We’ll land on a single…