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Fabian's public notepad
Personal blog · holzer.online/articlesprogrammingwebwriting
Fabian's public notepad is a personal blog at holzer.online about programming, web and writing. Since 2023, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 6 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-20, 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 this personal notepad for a post that reimplements the KWIC index example from the 1972 Parnas paper in two dozen lines, and for thoughts on literate programming and HTML READMEs.
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.
Thoughts on topics like software engineering, web development, blogging and the web in general
What Hacker News says?
Coincidentally, I reread the paper last weekend, and that side remark, about how the KWIC index would take a week or two to implement got my attention. So, I took the short specification given in the paper, and wrote it down in two dozen lines within a few minutes. I wrote it up as a blogpost just yesterday: https://holzer.online/articles/2025/03-05-kwic-quickly/ With a bit of cocktail napkin math that more than a f…
Comment linking /articles/2025/03-05-kwic-quickly/
on “On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules (1972)”Submitted The Devil Is in the Defaults as a story · 3 points
HN discussion"Write code top-down"[1] is to literate programming what "concentrate on writing readable code" is to code comments. (Having said that, I firmly hold the opinion that we should all be writing READMEs in HTML[2][3] (instead of Markdown) and more fully exploring/exploiting the capabilities—and ubiquity—of web browsers to enable "smart documentation": self-contained (i.e. single-file) study aids, visualization widgets,…
Comment linking /articles/easteregg-lp-style/
on “What is “literate programming”? (2024)”Mine doesn't meet the criterion on HN points, but well, maybe someday: https://holzer.online
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”https://holzer.online/articles/
Comment linking /articles/
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”I've tried a similar experiment with ChatGPT at the end of last year [0]. The solution wasn't all bad, but contained a subtle error in the initialization of the board. Pointing it out resulted in multiple incorrect fixes. I'm wondering if tic-tac-toe is complex enough to be a good example. You can compute all possible path through the game ahead of time and make a printed book [2] that plays an optimal strategy... […
Comment linking /articles/chatgpt-tic-tac-toe/
on “Optimal tic-tac-toe with GPT-4”