Top all-time · #14133
Andrew Quinn
Personal blog · andrew-quinn.me · on HN as hiAndrewQuinnprogrammingaihealth
Andrew Quinn writes Stable Sort on, a personal blog at andrew-quinn.me about programming, ai and health. Since 2022, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 67 times, most often “Backups and Digital Resiliency – my first self-audit”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-09-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Andrew Quinn's blog for a 2025 digital resiliency checklist for a personal cybersecurity audit, and for a longer post describing how he implemented it in his own life.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The personal blog of Andrew Quinn. Consulting available under the business name Siilikuin. For inquiries please email my first name at siilikuin.com.
Most-linked posts?
- Backups and Digital Resiliency – my first self-audit3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-09-09
- So you've installed `fzf`. Now what?2 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2024-01-17
- So you've installed `fzf`. Now what?2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-03-21
What Hacker News says?
The stats say https://andrew-quinn.me/ gets at least a trickle of traffic, and usually these days for the more obscure stuff I write, like my guide on using `reposurgeon` to convert SVN to Git repos for the first time. I feel the hours I have saved far outweigh the hours I spent writing that article and that's good enough for me.
Comment linking /
on “Why blog if nobody reads it?”Submitted 1000 Days Without Drinking as a story · 41 points
HN discussionI enjoy having a place to write that I can call my own, and it is a major flex when a topic comes up for a client like, say, migrating giant Subversion projects to Git, and I can whip out [1] and say "ah, I happen to know a thing or two about that". [1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon/
Comment linking /reposurgeon/
on “Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?”Submitted So you've installed `fzf`. Now what? as a story · 24 points
HN discussionClearly you have never needed code search across 50+ SVN repositories before, then. ;) No, but seriously, I wrote https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon for a reason. While I actually see some big benefits to SVN over git for areas with large binary assets like game development, the tool is just so ancient these days that it's just easier for me to convert SVN repos to git repos and then use those to figure out what I…
Comment linking /reposurgeon
on “Oh Shit, Git?”Submitted So you've installed `fzf`. Now what? as a story · 23 points
HN discussionI've been on parental leave, and it turns out newborns sleep a lot - so lots of stuff! :) The most exciting thing is I'm working on a way to pre-bake one's WiFi information and an SSH key into the piCore Tiny Core Linux image. piCore is sort of the holy grail for a lot of people who just want to stick a tiny personal-user server onto a Raspberry Pi and then not have to worry about the SD card burning out on them, be…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)”Submitted The dark forest of political communication as a story · 7 points
HN discussion`fzf` is so universally useful I just recommend it by default to everyone I work with now who touches a terminal. The new fuzzy finding shortcuts it creates for shell history and switching directories alone makes it worth it, even if you never call `fzf` itself, as I recorded back in my tutorial eons ago. [1] [1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf
Comment linking /fzf
on “Some terminal frustrations”Submitted Why and how I build terrible things as a story · 4 points
HN discussion;) This thread has given me some ideas to toy around with and maybe add to https://andrew-quinn.me/cli/ , let's say. That feels so wrong... but oh, so right. Who needs systemd when you've got a Pi and tmux?
Comment linking /cli/
on “Tmux is worse-is-better”Submitted So you've installed `fzf`. Now what? (2023) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI hit the front page of HN about two years ago with https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf , and I concur with this list. Among other things it taught me the invaluable lesson that only a surprise $100 bill from my (excellent!) hosting provider could have that I really should optimize my GIFs and cache them before that happens. As my father always says, experience is cheap at any cost!
Comment linking /fzf
on “The value of hitting the HN front page”Submitted Backups and Digital Resiliency – my first self-audit as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>even up until 2010, many companies were still hosting code on SVN I spent part of today choreographing the first part of a massive 30,000,000 LOC SVN to Git migration for my employer with ESR's (phenomenal!) `reposurgeon`. Never underestimate the long tail of database usage, even code data. (Any port in a storm, of course, I'll take Subversion than no VC at all any day of the week.) Learning this aggressively and i…
Comment linking /reposurgeon/
on “How GitHub replaced SourceForge as the dominant code hosting platform”Submitted Digital resiliency 2025, my first self-audit as a story · 2 points
HN discussionn=1 data point here, but most of my free time these days is spent learning Finnish, a notoriously difficult language for English monolinguals. (I haven't always been in the monolingual camp, but a decade away from Latin has 99% put me back there.) For the most part, I don't feel like it has made me any sharper. Had I taken the ~2000 hours I'm in the hole for so far and spent them on going to the gym and sleeping mor…
Comment linking /thoughts-on-language-learning-at-the-end-of-the-world/
on “Is being bilingual good for your brain?”Submitted Militant Contentment as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI use Anki the exact same way. After a lifetime of learning I have accepted that I will never read over anything I write for myself voluntarily - so my two options are: 1. Write an article so good I can publish it and look it over myself later on online. I did this last year with https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf/ , for example. 2. Create Anki cards out of the material. Use the builtin Card Browser or even https://dataset…
Comment linking /fzf/
on “LaTeX and Neovim for technical note-taking”Submitted Death worries me because I have things to do as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wish I had known about this site when I was writing [1]. If we use warranties as our expected lifecycle, this lets me drop down from $5 per TB-year of storage down to almost $2 per TB-year. What immense savings compared to the cloud! [1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#postscript-...
Comment linking /digital-resiliency-2025/
on “Disk Prices”Submitted We should use prediction markets for long term software maintenance as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou're on the right path! Alas, I am a heretic and think recovery codes under my approach may cause more problems than they solve. [1] Caution may be justified when it comes to doing this for something with as wide a surface area as a Google account. For me, if I'm going to have to compromise on 2FA somewhere anyway, I might as well go full hog and get an honest to goodness keyfile. [1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/digi…
Comment linking /digital-resiliency-2025/
on “Tarsnap is cozy”Submitted A gentle introduction to ESR's `reposurgeon` as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI appreciate you using the calculator! It's at [1] for anyone who wants to futz around with it. $3000 per TB-year is accurate to my knowledge, and yes, it is at least one, and probably two, orders of magnitude what you can get with more general purpose systems. Backblaze B2 is $72 per TB-year; AWS Glacier is $12 per TB-year I believe; purchasing two 20 TB Seagate drives for $300 apiece, mirroring them, and replacing…
Comment linking /digital-resiliency-2025/
on “Tarsnap is cozy”Submitted Wiping My GitHub as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI readily admit I'm a nerd about this stuff, and this is primarily a hobby of mine. I am explicitly not 80/20'ing this because it's fun. [1] One use case: I don't like the idea of having any accounts at all which I log into without the aid of a password manager. That creates a bootstrapping problem - how am I supposed to log into Google Drive to get my Google Drive password? A prepaid keyfile-based model is one part…
Comment linking /digital-resiliency-2025/
on “Tarsnap is cozy”Submitted Turning 30 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt depends on what you're after and what you're using it for. I broke down the costs I forecast for myself over the next decade at https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#postscript-... and found tarsnap is unlikely to cost me more than 50 cents for my usecase. Backblaze B2 will cost me about $70-80 over the next 10 years, but it has many orders of magnitude more data to back up. The cheapest I can find for…
Comment linking /digital-resiliency-2025/
on “Tarsnap is cozy”Submitted Thoughts on [Turning] 29 as a story · 1 points
HN discussion