Top all-time · #5098
Elijah Potter
Personal blog · elijahpotter.dev/articlesprogrammingwriting
Elijah Potter's personal blog at elijahpotter.dev covers programming and writing. Since 2023, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 110 times, most often “Hacker News, Sans AI”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this site mainly for hnsansai, a Hacker News view with AI stories filtered out, and for a post on Markov chains. Most links are bare or cited as context, with no comment judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The blog of software engineer Elijah Potter
Most-linked posts?
- Hacker News, Sans AI9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2026-06-28
- Markov chains are the original language models2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-02-01
- Stupid Simple Spellcheck2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-03-08
- Harper Evolves2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-08-22
- Hacker News, Sans AI2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-06-05
- Putting Harper in the Browser2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-06
- For the Love of Iframes2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-10-14
- Useful Things Agents Can Do That Are Not Writing Code2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-09-11
- Improving Rust Compile Times by 71%2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-11-06
- Do That Which Makes Your Life Easy2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-08-17
What Hacker News says?
HN is a reflection of the industry and we're at peak hype-cycle at the moment. I use this when I need a break https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai .
Comment linking /hnsansai
on “Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?”Submitted Markov chains are the original language models as a story · 454 points
HN discussionhttps://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
Comment linking /hnsansai
on “Fuck it, make it anyway”Submitted Markov Chains are the Original Language Models as a story · 251 points
HN discussion> LLMs are Markov Chains on steroids? Might be a reference to this[1] blog post which was posted here[2] a year ago. There has also been some academic work linking the two, like this[3] paper. [1]: https://elijahpotter.dev/articles/markov_chains_are_the_orig... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39213410 [3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02724
Comment linking /articles/markov_chains_are_the_original_language_models
on “Problem solving using Markov chains (2007) [pdf]”Submitted Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale as a story · 175 points
HN discussionSomeone made an HN without AI filter and it front paged here a bit ago. https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai (That's the first one I found, maybe there were others) So...are you complainers all using it? If not, why not? Spoiler -- because when someone says "I'm tired of reading about {X}", they're really saying "I want everyone else to stop talking about {X}". This has happened repeatedly over HN's life, and it just b…
Comment linking /hnsansai
on “How much of HN is AI?”Submitted Show HN: Prompting LLMs in Bash scripts as a story · 79 points
HN discussionThis one actually works: https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
Comment linking /hnsansai
on “Show HN: Hacker News, without AI”Submitted Harper Evolves as a story · 31 points
HN discussionAnother one: https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
Comment linking /hnsansai
on “Hacker News with reduced priority for AI driven content”Submitted Hacker News, Sans AI as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHN sans AI/LLM https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
Comment linking /hnsansai
on “I don't enjoy the Internet any more”Submitted Quality Requires Visual Design as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://elijahpotter.dev/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”Submitted My Writing Environment as a Software Engineer as a story · 4 points
HN discussionpost by author https://elijahpotter.dev/articles/hacker-news-sans-AI
Comment linking /articles/hacker-news-sans-AI
on “Hacker News, Sans AI”Submitted The Three Steps to an Apology as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHacker news Sans Ai https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
Comment linking /hnsansai
on “US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials”Submitted Everything Is a Leaky Abstraction as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFor the complete opposite I saw this in a comment earlier: https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
Comment linking /hnsansai
on “Show HN: Hacker News, but only AI news”Submitted Skill Acquisition as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
Comment linking /hnsansai
on “We need tech news sources which exclude AI”Submitted Harper Appoints Its First Committer as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Zen and the Art of Open Source Maintenance as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hacker News, Sans AI as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Harper Turns 1.0 Today as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Collaboration Does Not Suck as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Improving Rust Compile Times by 71% as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Improving Rust Compile Times by 71 Percent as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
