Top all-time · #69
Armin Ronacher
Personal blog · lucumr.pocoo.orgprogrammingsystemswriting
Armin Ronacher's personal blog at lucumr.pocoo.org covers programming, systems and writing. Since 2007, 428 different Hacker News readers have linked it 710 times, most often “Unicode in Python 3”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN links Armin Ronacher's blog for its Python, Unicode and Rust posts, and for recent writing on AI coding. Commenters call his 2016 trust post and his Astra post great.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Astra post 'great'; trust post 'incredible summary'; quote 'gold'; Rust posts 'good start', worth reading; a favourite.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Unicode in Python 323 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2014-05-12
- Python Packaging: Hate, hate, hate everywhere13 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2012-06-22
- Pi: The Minimal Agent Within OpenClaw12 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2026-01-31
- Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2026-09-09
- More About Unicode in Python 2 and 310 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2014-01-07
- Porting to Python 3 Redux9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2013-05-21
- Write More Classes9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2013-02-12
- Uninitialized memory: Unsafe Rust is too hard8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2022-01-30
- My First Open Source AI Generated Library7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2025-06-21
- Python and the Principle of Least Astonishment7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2011-07-09
What Hacker News says?
I used Fable some a bit back but have been using mostly Codex, and it seems pretty clear to me: the big models are not there to do terminal bench. They're there to plan and strategize and tell lesser models what they should do in terminal bench. We've had a year of nearly every model getting quite good at programming. I think with Fable & Astra we are seeing models trained to think at a different level, and I'm not…
Comment linking /2026/9/7/astra-why/
on “Claude Opus 5.5”Submitted 996 as a story · 1058 points
HN discussionGevent is nice. AsyncIO is terrible[0]. [0] http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2016/10/30/i-dont-understand-asyncio...
Comment linking /2016/10/30/i-dont-understand-asyncio/
on “Grumpy: Go running Python”Submitted You can't Rust that as a story · 462 points
HN discussionManual verification of releases and chain-of-trust systems help a lot. See for example https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2019/7/29/dependency-scaling/
Comment linking /2019/7/29/dependency-scaling/
on “Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised”Submitted Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again? as a story · 456 points
HN discussionEthernet on powered USB-C hubs has its own madness unfortunately: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2020/7/6/usb-c-network-hubs/
Comment linking /2020/7/6/usb-c-network-hubs/
on “USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)”Submitted Rust for Python Programmers as a story · 442 points
HN discussion> Models don’t have an inherent understanding of the difference between simulated and real environments, > (...) > also they don’t necessarily see a strong distinction between talking to a human and to other agents. Then how do you explain why they behave strange in sub-agents? (like mentioned here https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/ and in other articles) (or is that not a real phenomenon?)
Comment linking /2026/9/7/astra-why/
on “OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems”Submitted Agent design is still hard as a story · 426 points
HN discussionThis [1], discussed in another thread is an incredible summary of the issues; I hadn't even thought about packages that are required by other packages; it can lead to literally thousands of deps :-o. Node/npm and the web need a standard library that can be included piecemeal, from a well trusted source and packages that only depend upon this small subset should be highlighted. require('std/string/pad'); [1] http://l…
Comment linking /2016/3/24/open-source-trust-scaling/
on “Left-pad as a service”Submitted A Fresh Look at Rust as a story · 379 points
HN discussionDo either of these impress you? https://alexgaynor.net/2025/jun/20/serialize-some-der/ - using Claude Code to compose and have a PR accepted into llvm that implements a compiler optimization (more of my notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/30/llvm/ ) https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/6/21/my-first-ai-library/ - Claude Code for writing and shipping a full open source library that handles sloppy (hah) invalid XM…
Comment linking /2025/6/21/my-first-ai-library/
on “The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering”Submitted I don't understand Python's Asyncio as a story · 376 points
HN discussionhttps://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/2/13/moar-classes/
Comment linking /2013/2/13/moar-classes/
on “Write code. Not too much. Mostly functions.”Submitted Tech Debt: My Rust Library Is Now a CDO as a story · 363 points
HN discussionUnfortunately unicode in Python 3 is not necessarily better. See http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/ .
Comment linking /2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/
on “Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0”Submitted Be careful about what you dislike as a story · 351 points
HN discussion> For languages with decent abstractions such as async/await, it really isn't hard when you've done it for a while https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2016/10/30/i-dont-understand-asynci...
Comment linking /2016/10/30/i-dont-understand-asyncio/
on “Tokio 1.0 – async runtime for Rust”Submitted I'm not feeling the async pressure as a story · 337 points
HN discussionFlask was an April fools joke from Armin that became a serious thing. The thread locals hacks and use of globals is pretty horrible. I do quite like Falcon however if I want something != Django. http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2010/4/3/april-1st-post-mortem/ http://mitsuhiko.pocoo.org/flask-pycon-2011.pdf
Comment linking /2010/4/3/april-1st-post-mortem/
on “Removing Python 2.x support from Django for version 2.0”Submitted Be Careful with Python's New-Style String Format as a story · 334 points
HN discussionThe author of flask(and a lot more python stuff) goes a bit into detail here[0]. And as pointed out by another commenter my scenario is imaginary because user input needs to be passed to a f-strings. But I did update my original example with a tested `exec` because then you can import modules. I do see my imaginary attack as low effort for a grey- or black-hat to automate and weaponize. As mentioned/asked by parent,…
Comment linking /2016/12/29/careful-with-str-format/
on “Log4Shell update: second Log4j vulnerability published”Submitted The Python I Would Like To See as a story · 327 points
HN discussionProps to the team not only for changing their minds from a strongly-held belief but making it very public and not hiding the fact that it's a reversal. The linked post from Armin is gold: "... whenever you are confronted with a very strong opinion about a topic, reasonable discussions about the topic often involve arguments that have long become outdated or are no longer strictly relevant to the conversation." ( htt…
Comment linking /2016/11/5/be-careful-about-what-you-dislike/
on “You said no MCP”Submitted Tools: Code Is All You Need as a story · 313 points
HN discussionI wrote down a small little FAQ at the bottom, hope it answers some questions: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/2/15/rye-grows-with-uv/
Comment linking /2024/2/15/rye-grows-with-uv/
on “Uv: Python packaging in Rust”Submitted Scaling Mastodon is impossible as a story · 306 points
HN discussionWell I don't think I will be able to change your opinion if you feel so strongly about it. However some pointers perhaps might make it less painful: > Iterators everywhere are incredibly annoying, especially with my development workflow, where I don't put a line of code into a file before I run it manually in the interpreter. When I run a map over a list, I just want to see the freaking results. That's what list() i…
Comment linking /2013/7/2/the-updated-guide-to-unicode/
on “About Python 3”Submitted Thoughts on Python 3 as a story · 302 points
HN discussion
