Top all-time · #3318
Ian Duncan
Personal blog · iankduncan.comprogrammingsystems
Ian Duncan's personal blog at iankduncan.com covers programming and systems. Since 2014, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “Bash Is Not Enough: Why Large-Scale CI Needs an Orchestrator”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ian Duncan's posts on AI safety and OpenAI culture, including a long piece on AI and sex-cult claims, and on engineering topics such as GitHub Actions for CI/CD.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I'm Ian, a software engineer and entrepreneur in The Netherlands. I write about engineering, cooking, and life.
Most-linked posts?
- Bash Is Not Enough: Why Large-Scale CI Needs an Orchestrator4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-02-07
- /personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-09-17
- Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-09-17
- GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-02-05
- Getting Freaky in the Age of AI2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-08-22
- Punycode: My New Favorite Algorithm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-01
- The CRDT Dictionary: A Field Guide to Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-11-28
What Hacker News says?
Most people currently in the positions of power at these companies are tied together by their belief systems. It's like a group of college friends who have slept with each other, and very influenced by effective altruism(EA), kind of reiterating each others points. Like Sam Altman meeting his husband in Peter Thiel's pool. Thiel funds a lot of these ventures together with Andreassen, who is on boards of non-profits.…
Comment linking /personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse/
on “I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken”Submitted Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse as a story · 234 points
HN discussionAI safety is mostly a sex cult in Berkeley: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49831269 article is gone. archive: https://archive.is/QMo1k https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985 Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse: https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th... Edit: I have no take on sex cults, just adding additional info to the parent comment I'm responding to, thats is not just sci-fi authors, t…
Comment linking /personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse
on “I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken”Submitted The CRDT Dictionary: A Field Guide to Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types as a story · 220 points
HN discussionI too wrote about this, although _much_ longer, if you want a bit of a deeper dive on the subject https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...
Comment linking /personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse
on “AI safety is mostly a sex cult”Submitted JSON Schema Demystified: Dialects, Vocabularies and Metaschemas as a story · 89 points
HN discussionIf you're asking yourself WTF, here's an explainer: https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...
Comment linking /personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse
on “SlutCon”Submitted Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse as a story · 27 points
HN discussionThey were talking about prioritizing migration into Azure for a long while now. Not sure this incident today is related. https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a... And coincidentally, an early CircleCI engineer wrote an article about GitHub Action (TLDR: don't use GitHub Action for CI/CD!) https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2026-02-05-github-act... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469084…
Comment linking /engineering/2026-02-05-github-actions-killing-your-team
on “Another GitHub outage in the same day”Submitted Punycode: My New Favorite Algorithm as a story · 7 points
HN discussionWell, I've not tried to publish this on HN so far, but I guess given such a counterpoint, I should at least attempt to share: https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2026-08-07-getting-fr...
Comment linking /engineering/2026-08-07-getting-freaky-in-the-age-of-ai
on “Choose Boring Technology (2015)”Submitted Who Owns the Machines? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI'll be that guy. For what boils down to a personal take, light on technicalities, this reads like uncannily impersonal, prolonged attempt at dramatic writing. If you believe the dates in this blog, it's totally different in tone, style, and wording to a safely distant 2021 post ( https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2021-10-04-garbage-in-ne... ). It made me feel paranoid just in about three paragraphs. I apologize t…
Comment linking /personal/2021-10-04-garbage-in-never-out
on “GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team”Submitted TIL: HTTP/3 Is Not Always Faster Than HTTP/2 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bash Is Not Enough: Why Large-Scale CI Needs an Orchestrator as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Using React with GHCJS – Part 1 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stealing from Biologists to Compile Haskell Faster as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Functional Programmers Get Wrong About Systems as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bash Is Not Enough: Why Large-Scale CI Needs an Orchestrator as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The CRDT Dictionary: A Field Guide to Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Integrating a large Tokio-based Rust library with Haskell as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Getting Freaky in the Age of AI as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Getting Freaky in the Age of AI as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Mathematics of Build Queue Optimization and Auto-Scaling as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The New Blub Paradox, Or: Why TypeScript Is a Poor Choice for the AI Era as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bash Is Not Enough: Why Large-Scale CI Needs an Orchestrator as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Your Best Thinking Is Wasted on the Wrong Decisions as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bash Is Not Enough: Why Large-Scale CI Needs an Orchestrator as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted No, Really, Bash Is Not Enough: Why Large-Scale CI Needs an Orchestrator as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
