Top all-time · #14830
Ashwin Sundar
Personal blog · ashwinsundar.comprogrammingdesign
Ashwin Sundar's personal blog at ashwinsundar.com covers programming and design. Since 2023, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Do the Illegible”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Personal blog linked on HN as an example of a personal site, and for a post advocating diagrams-as-code. One comment points to its robots.txt in a debate about blocking LLM scrapers.
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.
Most-linked posts?
- Do the Illegible4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-07-15
What Hacker News says?
But how many of you wouldn’t hook up your website to Google? Me. https://ashwinsundar.com/robots.txt Your computer doesn't have the right to scrape what I say or do anything with it. I know one of the primary reasons that I do anything online is to provide an outlet for someone else to see it. If I didn’t want someone else to see it, I’d write it down on my notebook, not on the public web. Sounds like the same schpi…
Comment linking /robots.txt
on “Blocking LLMs from your website cuts you off from next-generation search”Submitted The Uline print catalog is impeccably designed as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI think a big problem is that people seem to think of development as either "waterfall" or "scrum", with a gradient between the two. Being strictly on either side is seen as bad, and being a blend of waterfall-agile is bad too. All I can think of is to throw both out the window and figure out a different set of metrics to prioritize, other than the business-driven Time-To-Deploy-And-We-Make-Profit. I don't have a pe…
Comment linking /story-points-stupid/
on “If Scrum is so great”Submitted Software I Liked in 2023 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://www.ashwinsundar.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog?”Submitted Do the Illegible as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI use Mermaid a lot, and my biggest gripe is the lack of normalized syntax. Everytime I want to create a new type of diagram, it's like learning a new language. I'm a big diagram-as-code proponent ( https://ashwinsundar.com/posts/diagrams-as-code/ ) - however, I get the impression that no one at Mermaid is really talking to each other when making new features. There doesn't seem to be much thought for how to make th…
Comment linking /posts/diagrams-as-code/
on “Ask HN: What would you want from a diagrams-as-code editor?”Submitted Do the Illegible as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wrote a short story about what happens to humanity after monks and priests go extinct. I feel like you brought that story to life https://ashwinsundar.com/blog/compiled/automonk.html
Comment linking /blog/compiled/automonk.html
on “Show HN: Sadhguru AI”Submitted Do the Illegible as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAbsolutely, I love that you're trying to write things in raw HTML for the record. As promised, here's my website that I rewrote in raw HTML a year ago - https://ashwinsundar.com/ I had originally written it using GatsbyJS, which I had been told was all the rage in web dev these days. I hated the experience. I migrated to a pure HTML + CSS approach, throwing away 99.9% of the bloatware. The articles are now written i…
Comment linking /
on “Why I want to write a blog in raw html in 2023”Submitted Connecting legibility to theory building in programming as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAssuming you're talking about engineering tasks, here is some miscellaneous advice to help you work more efficiently[^1]: - Develop mental models. Build heuristics. They allow you to recognize common scenarios more quickly and iterate on known solutions, instead of starting from scratch. - Write down high-level lessons from a project. Focus on generalizing the lessons. - Figure out how many "fucks to give" you have…
Comment linking /blog/compiled/learning-hard-things.html
on “Ask HN: How do you complete work faster?”Submitted The Cheap Web Scorecard as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI came from the world of medical device and helped design a software system for creating and generating risk management files for products. I wrote an article on the subject a few years ago: https://ashwinsundar.com/blog/compiled/rm-101.html
Comment linking /blog/compiled/rm-101.html
on “Ask HN: How do you do risk management for your software projects?”Submitted The Automonk as a story · 1 points
HN discussion