Top all-time · #572
Fernando Borretti
Personal blog · borretti.me · on HN as zetalyraeprogrammingphilosophy
Fernando Borretti's personal blog at borretti.me covers programming and philosophy. Since 2021, 105 different Hacker News readers have linked it 208 times, most often “Notes on Managing ADHD”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 37 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Fernando Borretti for his essays on AI and the future, the Austral language, and spaced repetition guides. Commenters also cite his ChatGPT explainer and fiction.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- succinct explanation of what's coming; great Anki article; very good ChatGPT guide; great compiler section; good fiction
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 37 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal website of Fernando Borretti.
Most-linked posts?
- Notes on Managing ADHD10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2025-06-12
- Austral: A Systems Language with Linear Types and Capabilities (2022)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2022-12-29
- Effective Spaced Repetition6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-04-10
- And yet It Understands5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-02-23
- When the Future Doesn't Need Us5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-07-28
- Composable SQL5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-01-25
- Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-10-05
- Human Bottlenecks4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-05-18
- You can choose tools that make you happy4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-05-20
- Some Data Should Be Code4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-01-31
What Hacker News says?
https://borretti.me/article/no-one-escapes-the-permanent-und... This is probably the best and succinct explanation of what’s coming.
Comment linking /article/no-one-escapes-the-permanent-underclass
on “Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem”Submitted Notes on Managing ADHD as a story · 633 points
HN discussionAnd what about when general purpose robots become practical? What will people do then? I don't understand this view of "AI empowers workers more than capital" at all. To me it's the exact opposite. Workers hold political and economic power today because they are needed. When that is no longer true, those in power will have no incentive to listen to them. The political economy of unregulated AGI development feels inc…
Comment linking /article/when-the-future-doesnt-need-us
on “We must pace the frontier”Submitted Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system as a story · 400 points
HN discussionI think this could be useful for the type of person that uses uses todo lists to help them tackle lots of small tasks that they intend to do immediately but somehow get distracted mid-action from and never finish (and then forget about altogether). As described in this blog post that front-paged hn some time ago: > When I notice a micro-task like this, my instinct is not to do it, but to put it in the todo list. The…
Comment linking /article/notes-on-managing-adhd
on “Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain”Submitted No Man Is an Island as a story · 333 points
HN discussionI was quite impressed with Austral[0], which used Linear Types and avoids the whole Rust-like implementation in favour of a more easily understandable system, albeit slightly more verbose. [0] https://borretti.me/article/introducing-austral
Comment linking /article/introducing-austral
on “Things Zig comptime won't do”Submitted Composable SQL as a story · 271 points
HN discussionIn earlier times, before Google or OS X even existed, long before "automatic updates", it used to be own experience that Microsoft's pre-installed Windows programs would run generally faster and with fewer issues (read: none) than third party software that a Windows user would install. This was also the case with software downloaded from Microsoft that a Windows user might install. Hence I thought perhaps MS Word to…
Comment linking //article/shells-are-two-things
on “FFmpeg Assembly Language Lessons”Submitted You can choose tools that make you happy as a story · 258 points
HN discussionNovella, free to read: The Epiphany of Gliese 581 https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581 > A linguist, a chemist, and a comparative psychologist explore the ruins of a dead superintelligence.
Comment linking /fiction/eog581
on “Permutation City (1994)”Submitted Lessons from Writing a Compiler as a story · 246 points
HN discussionThis is something you can do with a self-diagnosis. If reading the literature on autism gives you processes that improve your life, you don't need the diagnosis to confirm that. The life improvements were the end-goal in the first place. This kind of presupposes that you have suspicions about autism rather than just something in general. If you think you have autism, you're can target that literature anyway regardle…
Comment linking /article/notes-on-managing-adhd
on “Autism's confusing cousins”Submitted We won't "just hang out" as a story · 224 points
HN discussionA few other languages I think deserve a mention: * Carp: https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp * Nim: https://nim-lang.org/ * Zig: https://ziglang.org/ * Austral: https://borretti.me/article/introducing-austral
Comment linking /article/introducing-austral
on “The search for easier safe systems programming”Submitted Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729 as a story · 207 points
HN discussionThe OP does mention Austal as one of a few languages putting their own twist on Rust learnings, though the most interesting thing to me about Austral is indeed https://borretti.me/article/how-capabilities-work-austral rather than simply memory safety (though that's essential too).
Comment linking /article/how-capabilities-work-austral
on “Memory safety is necessary, not sufficient”Submitted Coarse is better as a story · 202 points
HN discussionA few things that can help with memory: - spaced repetition for stuff that you use sporadically. I use Anki, it's great. For how to use it, this article is great: https://borretti.me/article/effective-spaced-repetition . I've found a positive feedback loop where the more I know how to do things without looking anything up, the more I use the CLI, the easier I remember things, the more things I discover, etc. I read…
Comment linking /article/effective-spaced-repetition
on “CLI user experience case study”Submitted Austral: A Systems Language with Linear Types and Capabilities (2022) as a story · 155 points
HN discussionThere are some really good guides on how to use SRS/Anki out there. In order of most basic to more advanced: http://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm https://borretti.me/article/effective-spaced-repetition https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
Comment linking /article/effective-spaced-repetition
on “Individualized Spaced Repetition in Hierarchical Knowledge Structures”Submitted Signed integers are asymmetrical as a story · 136 points
HN discussionThis website (and all the author's libraries) was such a refresher. It has been important for me to not run away from CL (again). At that time, the "official" website, the first Google result for CL looked like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20160305135106/https://common-li... Fortunately, they revamped it circa 2018: https://common-lisp.net/ (work mainly due to @mmontone if I'm not mistaken). Since then, the Coo…
Comment linking /article/common-lisp-sotu-2015
on “Common Lisp”Submitted Implementing SM-2 in Rust as a story · 108 points
HN discussionAn interesting design choice of Austral is the use of second-class references [0] in place of first-class references like Rust does. This makes the implementation of a borrow checker simpler at the cost of reduced expressiveness. Hylo (previously Val) [1] tries also to find a way of avoiding first-class references using value semantic and subscripts. [0] https://borretti.me/article/second-class-references; [1] https…
Comment linking /article/second-class-references;
on “Austral: A Systems Language with Linear Types and Capabilities (2022)”Submitted Two Years of Rust as a story · 88 points
HN discussionhttps://borretti.me/article/no-one-escapes-the-permanent-und...
Comment linking /article/no-one-escapes-the-permanent-underclass
on “Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)?”Submitted Type Inference Was a Mistake as a story · 83 points
HN discussionI’m not GP, but here’s two articles I’ve found that have been extremely informative. https://borretti.me/article/effective-spaced-repetition https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition
Comment linking /article/effective-spaced-repetition
on “Spaced repetition for teaching two-year olds how to read”Submitted The Education of a Doomer as a story · 68 points
HN discussion
