Top all-time · #2756
Jack Rusher
Personal blog · jackrusher.com/journalprogrammingdesign
Jack Rusher's personal blog at jackrusher.com covers programming and design. Since 2019, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 37 times, most often “Stop Writing Dead Programs”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-03-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Jack Rusher's writing on what NFTs and signed digital art actually mean, and his talk and transcript 'Stop Writing Dead Programs' on live, interactive programming.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Jack Rusher’s web presence.
Most-linked posts?
- Stop Writing Dead Programs8 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2022-10-19
- What does it mean to buy a GIF?8 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2021-03-21
- Classic HCI Demos4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-11-08
- From Geometry to Algebra and Back Again: 4000 Years of Papers (Talk Transcript)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-10-11
- Object Orientation [2013 !]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-06-07
What Hacker News says?
I know you’re joking but lots of people still struggle with the reason why NFTs exist, including Apple’s unofficial PR department John Gruber. But it seems he finally understood it now thanks to this article: https://jackrusher.com/journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gi... [0] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/03/26/rusher-nfts
Comment linking /journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gif.html
on “Louvre makes its entire collection available online”Submitted Stop Writing Dead Programs as a story · 181 points
HN discussionIronically, this is great for NFT artists: most artists distributing their work as signed tokens want the high resolution media to be more widely distributed across many points of failure (that's exactly why IPFS is typically chosen). So far most comments here fail to understand that the economic value of an NFT, unlike traditional art through most of recent history, is not tied to scarcity of access to its media. I…
Comment linking /journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gif.html
on “TheNFTbay.org – The Billion Dollar Torrent (All NFT's from Ethereum and Solana)”Submitted Classic HCI Demos as a story · 71 points
HN discussionSigned prints are not necessarily cheap—see Ansel Adams prints going for nearly $1M USD[1]. It becomes a matter of what price society (or, perhaps just a handful of buyers) is willing to place on the artefact. One of the great things with provenance on the blockchain is that it is not solely dependent on private for-profit auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's to track provenance of the art we are creating. B…
Comment linking /journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gif.html
on “NFT's aren't the answer to the problems of digital art”Submitted What does it mean to buy a GIF? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI've changed the top URL to the video, in the hope of reducing the tedious complaints about webpage formatting that the transcript was generating. The transcript is here: https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/ . Please let's talk about the ideas now.
Comment linking /strange-loop-2022/
on “Stop Writing Dead Programs [video]”Submitted From Geometry to Algebra and Back Again: 4000 Years of Papers (Talk Transcript) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFast compilation is undoubtedly more essential in the Lisp paradigm of REPL-driven, interactive programming with S-expressions than in other languages. A pre-requisite perhaps for the world to 'Stop Writing Dead Programs' [0] [0] https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/
Comment linking /strange-loop-2022/
on “Jank development update – Moving to LLVM IR”Submitted A curated collection of HCI demo videos produced from 1983-2002 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou can argue the same about a signed print of a digital illustration, photograph, etc. See here: https://jackrusher.com/journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gi...
Comment linking /journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gif.html
on “An NFT without a blockchain”Submitted A curated collection of Human-Computer Interaction demo videos from 1983-2002 as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> just a tech bro creative virtue signaling He's quite well known https://jackrusher.com/ For art, go to "media" on his bluesky. Rather prolific.
Comment linking /
on “Sustain your creative drive in the face of technological change”Submitted Homesteading (2017) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSee also their blog post on Fuzzy Constraints (2023). https://www.inkandswitch.com/untangle/ Madly in love with how forward a frontier Ink & Switch cuts towards. Trying to make software less of a handcrafted artifact that each individual corporation builds on their own, as they see fit, and making computing a broader more universal project, with more regular hooks for humans to get themselves in the loop. A lot of "…
Comment linking /strange-loop-2022/
on “Ink and Switch Constraint System (2023)”Submitted Stop Writing Dead Programs (Strange Loop 2022) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> NFTs have absolutely nothing to do with artists or art. That's an incredibly ignorant remark. Art has been one of the more prominent uses of NFTs that emerged this year. Despite the relative immaturity of the technology, it has already proven transformative for many artists and non-profit art organizations. For example, see Hicetnunc.xyz. Further reading: [1] - https://www.plummerfernandez.com/works/not-another-jp…
Comment linking /journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gif.html
on “NFTs over 10k, you go to jail”Submitted Curated collection of HCI demo videos produced from 1983 to 2002 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI get that extensions are scary & dangerous, but it's absurd to me that dynamic code is now verboten. Your header issue doesn't totally click with me. Because it seems like a separate issue. I agree you should have the day over your user agent! But an extension executing remote code doesn't seem to be a factor. Remote code means that we can't create extensions with pluggable modularity. We can't build an Yahoo Pipes…
Comment linking /strange-loop-2022/
on “Malicious extensions circumvent Google's remote code ban”Submitted Stop Writing Dead Programs (Strange Loop 2022) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wasn’t familiar with the term “Residential programming,” but it reminds me of the talk “Stop Writing Dead Programs” ( https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/ ) Increasingly, I think that an agent (and I) would work much better in a malleable, notebook-like, inspectable program, than it would with its current file-based “edit and re-run” primitives. “Marimo pair” (built into their notebook-like primitive) is an a…
Comment linking /strange-loop-2022/
on “Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time”Submitted Geometry to Algebra and Back Again as a story · 2 points
HN discussionRust can't even dynamically link! I'm super on board the rust train right now & super loving it. But no, code hot loading is not common. Most code in the world is dead code. Most languages are for dead code. It's sad. Stop writing dead code (2022) was no where near the first, is decades and decades late in calling this out, but still a good one. https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/
Comment linking /strange-loop-2022/
on “Pi – a minimal terminal coding harness”Submitted Leopards in the Source Code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe two REPLs are not the same, unless editor-integrated Python REPLs have gone through a revolution since I last checked. See https://lambdaisland.com/blog/29-12-2017-the-bare-minimum-cl... and circa 22:49.90 of [Stop Writing Dead Programs][1], on the topic of interacting with a live system as you write it. [1]: https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/
Comment linking /strange-loop-2022/
on “REBL”Submitted Object Orientation [2013 !] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is a not-so subtle advantage JavaScript has over 90% of everything else: Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP), which exists/is-great in-large-part thanks to JavaScript being an alive language. Of the Stop Writing Dead Programs variety ( https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/ , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33270235 ). It's just astoundingly capable, so very richly exposes such a featureful runtime, across s…
Comment linking /strange-loop-2022/
on “Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software”Submitted Geometry to Algebra and Back Again as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Ctrl is the most pressed control key for people like me who live in the terminal. But the default placement of the ctrl keys in modern layouts is so wrong. I have never understood it. I guess there has to be a historical reason but I've yet to find out. (Help me, greybeards) I've seen this talk here and the speaker mentioned the ADM-3A (that is also mentioned in the article itself) terminals at about the 17/18 min…
Comment linking /strange-loop-2022/
on “Vim Foot Pedal”Submitted Geometry to Algebra and Back Again as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
