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Hypercritical
Personal blog · hypercritical.codesignhardwarewriting
Hypercritical is a personal blog at hypercritical.co about design, hardware and writing. Since 2013, 84 different Hacker News readers have linked it 113 times, most often “I Made This”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Readers link John Siracusa's posts for his long OS X reviews and his essays on software and the Mac, including 'Code Hard or Go Home' on open-source projects. Commenters also cite his app pages.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- 'great article' on open-source code, 'only one worth reading' on Nintendo, 'best synopsis' of the Nintendo situation
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- I Made This5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-01-11
- Nintendo in crisis4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-09-02
- /front-and-center/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-04-01
- Hyperspace4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-02-25
- OS X Reviewed4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-04-16
- Code Hard or Go Home4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-04-13
- /switchglass/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-12-09
- /2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-09-20
- Spatial Computing3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-31
- Streaming App Sentiments3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-02-17
What Hacker News says?
https://hypercritical.co/2021/05/21/images/city-of-chiplets....
Comment linking /2021/05/21/images/city-of-chiplets.png
on “Apple M1 Ultra”Submitted Hyperspace as a story · 849 points
HN discussionJohn Siracusa, a fairly well known Apple pundit, wrote one of his semi-annual blog posts on this - https://hypercritical.co/2022/02/17/streaming-app-sentiments It's a follow up to an earlier article where he lays out the table stakes for streaming apps, both worth reading.
Comment linking /2022/02/17/streaming-app-sentiments
on “Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?”Submitted OS X Reviewed as a story · 461 points
HN discussionNow you understand why this app costs more than 2x the price of alternatives such as diskDedupe. Any halfway-competent developer can write some code that does a SHA256 hash of all your files and uses the Apple filesystem API's to replace duplicates with shared-clones. I know swift, I could probably do it in an hour or two. Should you trust my bodgy quick script? Heck no. The author - John Siracusa - has been a profe…
Comment linking /hyperspace/
on “Hyperspace”Submitted The Art of the Possible as a story · 177 points
HN discussionClaude 3.7 just rewrote the whole thing (just based on reading the webpage description) as a commandline app for me, so there's that. And because it has no Internet access yet (and because I prompted it to use a workaround like this in that circumstance), the first thing it asked me to do (after hallucinating the functionality first, and then catching itself) was run `curl https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/ | sed…
Comment linking /hyperspace/
on “Hyperspace”Submitted An unsolicited streaming app spec as a story · 136 points
HN discussionFor those mentioning that there's no price listed, it's not that easy as in the App Store the price varies by country. You can open the App Store link and then look at "In App Purchases" though. For me on the German store it looks like this: Unlock for One Year 22,99 € Unlock for One Month 9,99 € Lifetime Unlock 59,99 € So it supports both one time purchases and subscriptions. Depending on what you prefer. More abou…
Comment linking /hyperspace/
on “Hyperspace”Submitted Fear of a WebKit Planet as a story · 120 points
HN discussion> Two kinds of purchases are possible: one-time purchases and subscriptions. https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#purchase
Comment linking /hyperspace/
on “Hyperspace”Submitted The Case for a True Mac Pro Successor as a story · 102 points
HN discussionThey had long discussions about the pricing on the podcast the author is a part of (atp.fm). It went through a few iterations of one time purchase, fee for each time you free up space and a subscription. There will always be people unhappy about either choice. Edit: Apparently both is possible in the end: https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#purchase
Comment linking /hyperspace/
on “Hyperspace”Submitted Journey for PS3: Strange Game (2012) as a story · 93 points
HN discussionWhat kind of changes could you make to one clone that would still qualify it as a clone? If there are changes, it's no longer the same file. Even after reading the How It Works[0] link, I'm not groking how it works. Is it making some sort of delta/diff that is applied to the original file? That's not possible for every file format like large media files. I could see that being interesting for text based files, but t…
Comment linking /hyperspace/
on “Hyperspace”Submitted About My Yosemite Review as a story · 90 points
HN discussionAlmost, but the difference is that if you change one of hardlinked files, you change "all of them". (It's really the same file but with different paths.) https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#how-it-works APFS apparently allows for creating "link files" which when changed, start to diverge.
Comment linking /hyperspace/
on “Hyperspace”Submitted Spatial Computing as a story · 88 points
HN discussionMy understanding is that it is a copy-on-write clone, not a hard link. [1] > Q: Are clone files the same thing as symbolic links or hard links? > A: No. Symbolic links ("symlinks") and hard links are ways to make two entries in the file system that share the same data. This might sound like the same thing as the space-saving clones used by Hyperspace, but there’s one important difference. With symlinks and hard link…
Comment linking /hyperspace/
on “Hyperspace”Submitted Apple Turnover as a story · 53 points
HN discussionI still read some of the classics (surprised nobody mentioned them so far) and also a few newer ones: https://kottke.org/ https://daringfireball.net https://seths.blog https://www.freedomain.com/blog/ https://www.cringely.com https://www.zeldman.com https://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com http://quirksmode.org/blog/ http://hypercritical.co
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Technological Conservatism as a story · 53 points
HN discussion> I use it to follow people This is something I have a real need for. Specifically, podcast hosts. I want to follow certain hosts and listen to every random show they're on. Some hosts do keep lists of their appearances across many shows: http://hypercritical.co/about/appearances/ But that forces me to manually find the episodes and add each one to my podcast app. I want something that aggregates appearances into a…
Comment linking /about/appearances/
on “Show HN: Fraidycat”Submitted Apple’s 2013 Scorecard as a story · 44 points
HN discussionCould be a defensive move of Elasticsearch to win the mindshare of the community. OpenSearch has been gaining some momentum, albeit far from being comparable to Elasticsearch. See OSS Insight: https://ossinsight.io/analyze/elastic/elasticsearch?vs=opens... . I'm not sure Amazon is willing to go all in to win the war of search services, for that means they need to to handsomely reward the best coders that contribute…
Comment linking /2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home
on “Elasticsearch is open source, again”Submitted Code Hard or Go Home as a story · 30 points
HN discussionIn the world of OSS, code speaks. A small team may not help the cause of Open Search. This article nails how code influences leadership in an OSS project: http://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home
Comment linking /2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home
on “OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana”Submitted CES: Worse Products Through Software (2013) as a story · 27 points
HN discussionI believe the app “Front and Center” solves this: https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/
Comment linking /front-and-center/
on “macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)”Submitted Nintendo in crisis as a story · 21 points
HN discussion
