Top all-time · #3782
Daniel Janus
Personal blog · blog.danieljanus.plprogramming
Daniel Janus's personal blog at blog.danieljanus.pl covers programming. Since 2010, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 86 times, most often “Web of Documents (2019)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Janus's posts on database forking and branching in Datomic, the GPD hardware line, and a source-code and architecture analysis of the game 2048.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Web of Documents (2019)4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-10-07
- On LLMs in Programming4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-12-27
- Word Champions3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-01-03
- How to Pay for Books2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-09-24
- Translating non-trivial codebases with Claude2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-03-28
- I love my GPD Micro PC2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-08-18
- 2048: A close look at the source code2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-04-02
- You can't branch Datomic from the past2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-04-22
- My Mental Model of Transducers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-09-09
- Cleaner Codebase, Happier Mind2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-02
What Hacker News says?
I won't. Under my definition, it causes the page to stop being a document and start being an application. Being able to detect JS can be useful sometimes, but, to me, it doesn't belong in a boilerplate. http://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
Comment linking /2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
on “My Current HTML Boilerplate”Submitted I love my GPD Micro PC as a story · 439 points
HN discussionIt's not only "not intimidating", it's actually a prime example of good quality code. See http://blog.danieljanus.pl/blog/2014/04/02/2048/
Comment linking /blog/2014/04/02/2048/
on “2048, success and me”Submitted Things I wish Git had: Commit groups as a story · 289 points
HN discussionThere are ways we as a society could endorse these kinds of libraries while also keeping authors incentivized. Here’s how I see it: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/09/24/paying-for-books/
Comment linking /2022/09/24/paying-for-books/
on “3x new books added to the Pirate Library Mirror”Submitted Lossy CSS compression for fun and loss (or profit) as a story · 254 points
HN discussionI think we can have our cake and eat it too. https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/09/24/paying-for-books/
Comment linking /2022/09/24/paying-for-books/
on “Z-library founders arrested in Argentina”Submitted Web of Documents (2019) as a story · 164 points
HN discussionAnother attempt: http://blog.danieljanus.pl/2014/05/20/you-already-use-lisp-s...
Comment linking /2014/05/20/you-already-use-lisp-syntax/
on “An Intuition for Lisp Syntax”Submitted Clojure as a dependency as a story · 138 points
HN discussionSurprisingly, no it does not. Datomic has a more limited feature that lets you make an in-memory clone of the latest copy of the db for speculative writes, which might be useful for tests, but you can't take an arbitrary version of the db with as-of and use it as the basis for a new version on disk. See: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2025/04/22/datomic-forking-the-p... There's nothing technically that should prevent t…
Comment linking /2025/04/22/datomic-forking-the-past/
on “Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18”Submitted You already use Lisp syntax as a story · 110 points
HN discussionI've created a Clojure library to facilitate scraping scenarios like this one: https://github.com/nathell/skyscraper Writeup of a sample data acquisition + analysis usecase: http://blog.danieljanus.pl/2020/05/08/making-of-clojure-depe...
Comment linking /2020/05/08/making-of-clojure-dependency/
on “Show HN: A tool to scrape senators' stock transactions for your own analysis”Submitted Lithium: a 16-bit kernel (sort of) written in Clojure (sort of) as a story · 65 points
HN discussionThat’s a serious downgrade. https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
Comment linking /2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
on “CSS Zen Garden”Submitted Ever wanted to programmatically file a lawsuit? In Poland, you can. as a story · 60 points
HN discussionA few years ago, I spotted a guy on the underground in Warsaw, hacking on some code in a language I didn't recognize, but it was definitely assembly of some sort. Being shy, I resorted to throwing curious glimpses at his laptop for a few stations, but eventually curiosity got the better of me and I asked ‘sorry, is this ARM’? To which the guy replies, smiling, ‘ah no, it’s MIPS!’ Now I program casually in public spa…
Comment linking /2022/08/18/i-love-my-gpd-micro-pc/
on “I program on the subway”Submitted Sunflower: (clojure) extract story text from HTML markup tree as a story · 24 points
HN discussionIn 2019, I wrote about the need for a web of documents [0], where I wrote about the importance of having static documents and sketched another approach. Gemini is a web of documents. A rudimentary one, but very content-focused – the signal-to-noise ratio is typically much higher than on WWW. You can visit any capsule in the Geminispace and have full confidence that it’ll only serve you gemtext to read. [0]: https://…
Comment linking /2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
on “Gemini is a little gem”Submitted I made a website to guess tomorrow’s Covid-19 case count as a story · 22 points
HN discussionRelevant: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
Comment linking /2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
on “Bombadillo: a non-web browser”Submitted Testing a compiler that can’t even print as a story · 14 points
HN discussionRelated: http://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
Comment linking /2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
on “The evolution of the web, and a eulogy for XHTML2”Submitted You can't branch Datomic from the past as a story · 5 points
HN discussionGPDs used to be much cheaper[1], and IMO made much more sense that way. Unfortunately, GPD indeed seems to have caught the expensive bug. [1] https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/08/18/i-love-my-gpd-micro-p...
Comment linking /2022/08/18/i-love-my-gpd-micro-pc/
on “PinePhone Pro [GNU/Linux smartphone] has been discontinued”Submitted Web of Documents (2019) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionClojure alleviates this to a great extent by automatically namespace-qualifying symbols within quasiquoted forms, which prevents clashes between let-bound symbols (which are never qualified) and ones from the global scope. It’s still possible to shoot yourself in the foot (see https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2020/01/21/middleware/ for my personal story), but for that you need `binding`, `with-redefs` or `alter-var-root`…
Comment linking /2020/01/21/middleware/
on “The Problem with Macros”Submitted Cleaner Codebase, Happier Mind as a story · 4 points
HN discussionDaniel Janus had written about it here: http://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/ I am fairly certain I have written about it as well, here or on my blog somewhere. My ideas are a bit more pragmatic maybe: I hope Mozilla or someone else will make a html version of asm.js - an extremely performant renderer for a subset of html and css. This could solve the bootstrapping dilemma since it would work in ev…
Comment linking /2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
on “In protest of the web{*} bulldozer, a response to websocket port scanning”Submitted How to Pay for Books as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
