Top all-time · #3493
Andrew Montalenti
Personal blog · pixelmonkey.orgprogrammingweb
Andrew Montalenti's personal blog at pixelmonkey.org covers programming and web. Since 2009, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 53 times, most often “Clojonic: Pythonic Clojure”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Andrew Montalenti's blog for a streamparse launch announcement, Python web-crawling slides, and a note on a Chase phishing lookalike site. The comments only link or cite these posts and do not judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
@amontalenti - Founder/CTO. Coding in: Python, JavaScript, Zig.
Most-linked posts?
- Clojonic: Pythonic Clojure4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-11-03
- Groovy, the Python of Java3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-12-28
- Lenovo and the new Linux desktop experience2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-09-18
- What One Does - one startup founder's story2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-10-18
- The Startup Diet (Lost 15 lbs while at an Incubator)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-10-27
- Startups: not for the faint of heart2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-04-03
What Hacker News says?
Buffer is a fully distributed (remote) team. The money they save on offices, they spend on travel. Do you think an office for 100 people would cost less than $400K/year? (I know it wouldn't in NYC.) See my notes on this here: http://pixelmonkey.org/pub/distributed-teams/notes/#mixing-d...
Comment linking /pub/distributed-teams/notes/
on “Buffer Layoffs”Submitted Why Startups Die as a story · 122 points
HN discussionYea, I had a similar experience at a Wall Street firm to the OP. However, my conclusions were different. My advice to this guy is the same advice I had for my younger self back in 2009: "Get out while you still can!". I wrote a blog post reflecting on my experience. Here is the relevant snippet: Working at the bank was a huge change from the rest of my life. The primary focus of my job became my paycheck. Technology…
Comment linking /2010/10/16/what-one-does
on “In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things”Submitted Joel Spolsky's business operating system as a story · 93 points
HN discussionLet's chat by email. Maybe talking to another CTO who is running a post-Series A startup and who is roughly your age with a similar background (and who has the exact same concerns) will let us figure out a plan out of the madness. http://pixelmonkey.org/contact
Comment linking /contact
on “Why do we work so hard?”Submitted Full Distributed Teams: are they viable? as a story · 84 points
HN discussionI generalized DHH's conclusion re: TDD in my blog post, "XDDs: stay healthily skeptical and don't drink the kool aid": http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/02/12/xdds "I list one of my skills as “thought-driven development”. This is a little tongue-in-cheek; software engineering over the last few years has developed a lot of “XDDs,” such as test-driven development, behavior-driven development, model-driven development, e…
Comment linking /2012/02/12/xdds
on “TDD is dead. Long live testing.”Submitted Groovy, the Python of Java as a story · 80 points
HN discussionFirst of all, the Linux desktop is not dead. As I wrote on my blog recently: "In the [past three years], Linux has grown — albeit slowly — in desktop usage. After nearly 2 years of no growth (2008-2010, lingering around 1% of market), in 2011 Linux saw a significant uptick in desktop adoption (+64% from May 2011 to January 2012). However, Linux’s desktop share still about 1/5 of the share of Apple OS X and 1/50 the…
Comment linking /2012/08/18/cloud-gnu
on “What killed the Linux desktop”Submitted The Startup Diet (Lost 15 lbs while at an Incubator) as a story · 53 points
HN discussionRelated: an article comparing Python and Clojure, called "Clojonic: Pythonic Clojure". http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2014/11/02/clojonic
Comment linking /2014/11/02/clojonic
on “Hy – A dialect of Lisp that’s embedded in Python”Submitted Startups: not for the faint of heart as a story · 51 points
HN discussionMy team at Parse.ly is fully remote/distributed -- and one of the motivating reasons I formed the team that way was to reproduce the feel of Fog Creek's "bionic office", but in each engineer's home office space. I discussed this a little in my "Notes on Distributed Teams" presentation here: http://pixelmonkey.org/pub/distributed-teams/notes/#open-pla... Here's how my personal home office looks: https://flic.kr/p/v1N…
Comment linking /pub/distributed-teams/notes/
on “Ask HN: Which companies give programmers offices?”Submitted Getting Real About Design Inspiration as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThat's a bit of a semantic argument. Python already has "object-oriented single dispatch" -- aka traditional object-oriented polymorphism. What this module adds is "functional single dispatch". So, whereas before you'd always be forced to implement some type-varying function using two classes `HandleA` and `HandleB`, each with an implementation for `handle`: class HandleA: def handle(self): pass class HandleB: def h…
Comment linking /2013/10/20/singledispatch
on “What’s New In Python 3.4”Submitted What One Does - one startup founder's story as a story · 13 points
HN discussionI wrote about this issue a couple years ago, observing similar behavior. I used a modified horse gambling game as a metaphor for the investor dynamic. "It's easier to play the option than the bet." http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2010/12/13/its-easier-to-play-the... In this new race, small signals have a big impact. Charge ahead suddenly and you might get your 3 spots filled. Convince a top-tier gambler to go to bat for…
Comment linking /2010/12/13/its-easier-to-play-the-option-than-the-bet
on “Investor Herd Dynamics”Submitted Groovy, the Python of Java as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI have such fond memories of sneaking printouts of The Debian Policy Guide and A Brief History of Debian into my boring high school classes and reading them tucked into my binders labeled "Spanish" and "Pre-Calc". I still remember how I marveled at the Debian Developers Map ( http://www.debian.org/devel/developers.loc ), which showed in one image a collaboration of hundreds of talented individuals across the globe,…
Comment linking /2012/08/16/the-debian-manifesto
on “Happy birthday Debian”Submitted Clojonic: Pythonic Clojure as a story · 7 points
HN discussionMy reaction to all this on my blog, "The New Republic as a product": http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2014/12/13/the-new-republic-as-a-... The resigning editors wrote: "It is a sad irony that [...] liberalism’s central journal should be scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon. The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable blow." Is it a doubt of anyone here that, in the web era, "liberalism's central journ…
Comment linking /2014/12/13/the-new-republic-as-a-product
on “Inside the Collapse of the New Republic”Submitted PyCon 2013: The Debrief as a story · 7 points
HN discussionIt gets worse: http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2009/08/21/chase-insecure Chase sent me this, too. If you visit the site in Chrome, it tells you it's a suspected phishing site.
Comment linking /2009/08/21/chase-insecure
on “Toward a Grand Unified Theory of n00bs”Submitted Build a web app fast: Python, HTML & JavaScript resources as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI have a much simpler explanation for this data. More people search about all aspects of their iPhone ahead of Apple releases -- whether it is slow, where to buy a new one, how to sell their old one, etc. This hypothesis is supported by the same data source (Google Trends data). This has more to do with Apple's marketing strategy (hush-hush until a big media launch day) vs Samsung's (slow drip releases across variou…
Comment linking /2014/07/27/nytimes-bigdata
on “Hold the Phone: A Big-Data Conundrum”Submitted The value of money in a technology career as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI did a look back at using a Palm V as a young techie back in 1998/1999. It's interesting since I still had some records of screenshots from real-world apps I used on a daily basis back then. http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/12/30/mobile-in-1998 The Palm V wasn't that far off from modern smartphones, when set up correctly. Of course, lacked color and cellular connectivity. But, form factor was very similar to modern…
Comment linking /2012/12/30/mobile-in-1998
on “General Magic is a film about the ‘90s startup that imagined the smartphone”Submitted “So, you work in IT?” as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMy favorite part from this speech, "Everybody Worships." http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2014/11/26/everybody-worships
Comment linking /2014/11/26/everybody-worships
on “David Foster Wallace's Kenyon Commencement Speech (2005)”Submitted Persistent Folders: Or, why ideas don’t matter, and execution does as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
