Top all-time · #4215
Amit's Thoughts
Personal blog · amitp.blogspot.comprogrammingdesign
Amit's Thoughts is a personal blog at amitp.blogspot.com about programming and design. Since 2008, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 36 times, most often “LLMs and Shaders”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Amit's Thoughts for practical notes on building Emacs on macOS and for essays on Lisp syntax. Most comments cite posts as sources, and one commenter recommends the tech blog as regular reading.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Amit has crazy thoughts .
Most-linked posts?
- LLMs and Shaders3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-07-12
- Lisp vs Python3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2008-01-28
- Mac Keyboard with Hidutil2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-04-13
- Amit's Thoughts: Emacs consult-buffer filenames2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-29
- Firefox 89 Tab Appearance2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-03
- Non-Consensual Personalization2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-02-01
- Axial name highlighting2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-07-07
- Amit's Thoughts: Emacs Tree-sitter custom highlighting, part 32 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-06
What Hacker News says?
Yes. Frustrating bug. I ended up compiling my own, but I think the newer pretests have the fix. If you want to build your own pretest with the "Yamamoto Mitsuharu" version of Emacs (railwaycat), I posted the commands I ran: http://amitp.blogspot.com/2014/04/building-mac-os-x-emacs.ht...
Comment linking /2014/04/building-mac-os-x-emacs.html
on “Emacs and Vim”Submitted Non-Consensual Personalization as a story · 331 points
HN discussion> Lisps where only lists/pairs are syntactically first class There are several types of first class syntax in Lisp: http://amitp.blogspot.com/2007/04/lisp-vs-python-syntax.html
Comment linking /2007/04/lisp-vs-python-syntax.html
on “Getting started with Clojure”Submitted Firefox 89 Tab Appearance as a story · 258 points
HN discussionMy life is also in Emacs. I'm using it all the time on the new Macbooks and it's working great for me (gui mode, not terminal mode). There are two major versions of Emacs on Mac. There's the "NextStep" version, which is part of the official emacs repository, and the "Mac" version, which is separately maintained. * emacsformacosx.com runs in x86 emulation mode, but flickers when using lsp mode --> this is the version…
Comment linking /2020/11/building-emacs-27-on-apple-arm-m1.html
on “The Worst Experience I've Had with an Aarch64 MacBook”Submitted Emacs Tree-sitter custom highlighting as a story · 123 points
HN discussionSeems like the Homebrew version already builds on M1. People have been working on this since last year. https://amitp.blogspot.com/2020/11/building-emacs-27-on-appl...
Comment linking /2020/11/building-emacs-27-on-apple-arm-m1.html?m=1
on “The Worst Experience I've Had with an Aarch64 MacBook”Submitted Lisp vs Python as a story · 76 points
HN discussionAm going to chime in as well - Amit is amazing and has been providing his knowledge and experience since the early 90's, when I first encountered him on FidoNet over BBS, then next on Usenet. Regular tech blog: https://amitp.blogspot.com/ Game Dev blog: https://simblob.blogspot.com/
Comment linking /
on “Red Blob Games: Interactive visual explanations of math and algorithms”Submitted Non-consensual personalization as a story · 15 points
HN discussionI don't think this author makes his point very well. But I think Amit makes a similar point here: http://amitp.blogspot.com/2007/04/lisp-vs-python-syntax.html Single quote summary: "When I'm writing code I prefer Lisp; when I'm reading code I prefer Python." I think where Mr. Kesteloot goes wrong is comparing Lisp with Java. Java sucks both for reading and writing, pretty much.
Comment linking /2007/04/lisp-vs-python-syntax.html
on “Production Languages and Toy Languages”Submitted Axial name highlighting as a story · 14 points
HN discussionIt's interesting to see many people here post about their blog being 20 years old. Was that the golden age of RSS? It turns out my blogs are also 20 years old (although my web site is older). My first posts[1][2] were not so interesting though. It took a while to figure out what I really wanted to do with the blogs. At first they were all over the place, but my work-related one ended up being a "making of" my work p…
Comment linking /2003/04/playing-games-vs-programming-games.html
on “Twenty Years of Blogging”Submitted Mac Keyboard with Hidutil as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSubmitted Emacs and Shellcheck as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Axial Name Highlighting as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Using an LLM to query my notes as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Emacs Tree-sitter custom highlighting, part 2 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted LLMs and Shaders as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted LLMs and Shaders as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted LLMs: Screenwriters vs. Characters as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Emacs Tree-sitter custom highlighting, part 3 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Amit's Thoughts: Emacs Tree-sitter custom highlighting, part 3 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Mac keyboard layout configuration with hidutil as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Road Archaeology, Part 1 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Microtunnels as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Changing Firefox 89 tab appearance as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Notes About Eyeglasses as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted LLMs and Shaders as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Mac keyboard layout configuration with hidutil as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
