Top all-time · #20427
Joseph Szymborski
Personal blog · jszym.com/blog · on HN as jszymborskisecurityprogramming
Joseph Szymborski's personal blog at jszym.com covers security and programming. Since 2017, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “On Mastodon-Powered Blog Comments”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-11, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Personal blog whose post on adding Mastodon/ActivityPub comments to a static blog is cited by an HN commenter as one of several similar ideas, in a thread about removing Disqus.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog about code, cancer, and coddiwompling written by Joseph Szymborski, an PhD student at McGill studying machine learning and molecular biology.
Most-linked posts?
- On Mastodon-Powered Blog Comments2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-02-26
What Hacker News says?
Shameless plug, but I wrote a post on the pros/cons/implications of using Mastodon to power a comments section: https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/
Comment linking /blog/mastodon_blog_comments/
on “Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites”Submitted Enlisting in the Fight Against Link Rot as a story · 169 points
HN discussionThere are similar¹𝄒²𝄒³ ideas for Mastodon / ActivityPub: ¹ https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/ ² https://jan.wildeboer.net/2023/02/Jekyll-Mastodon-Comments/ ³ https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
Comment linking /blog/mastodon_blog_comments/
on “I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse”Submitted Ending 20 year-old friendships using genetic algorithms as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIt might be a bit tasteless to be quoting ones own master's thesis, but I've always been a bit proud of my (embarrassingly long-winded and self-indulgent) acknowledgements. It begins with > "First and foremost, I’d like to thank the nameless stranger that is responsible for enforcing the deadline for the submission of this thesis; but for their unwavering absolutism this thesis would exist in a perpetual state of be…
Comment linking /attachments/about/thesis.pdf
on “The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements”Submitted Maybe don't use Blake3 on Short Inputs as a story · 6 points
HN discussionNot sure if DDG patched this, but querying DDG w/o the month based tick results in a result that'll point you to the correct subreddit for finding which phone to buy in <current month> [0]. Although it's not using the "This Month" dropdown, doing the vanilla search still gets you the "most correct" answer imho. [0] https://jszym.com/dl/imgs/20200119-ddg-example.png
Comment linking /dl/imgs/20200119-ddg-example.png
on “How is search so bad? A case study”Submitted Hiding Images in XMP Metadata as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI suppose a middle ground is something like https://siv.rs/short_urls I do this on my own blog. e.g. a post titled "Mr. Robot Hides Data on Audio Disks, And So Can You! (Season 3 Spoilers)" has the URL https://jszym.com/blog/mr_robot_steganography/ and not the WordPress style https://jszym.com/blog/mr_robot_hides_data_audio_disks_so_ca...
Comment linking /blog/mr_robot_hides_data_audio_disks_so_can_you_season_3_spoilers/
on “Short URLs: Why and How”Submitted Mr.Robot Hides Data on Audio Disks, and So Can You as a story · 3 points
HN discussionGreat read. I posted some thoughts on the pros and cons of using Mastodon for comments. Overall, it's been a positive experience for my blog. https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/
Comment linking /blog/mastodon_blog_comments/
on “Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog”Submitted On Mastodon-Powered Blog Comments as a story · 2 points
HN discussionLocation: Montreal Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Negotiable, but likely not Technologies: Python and its datastack, PyTorch, a little Rust Resume: https://dl.jszym.com/share/general_cv.pdf Email: hn@jszym.com Website: https://jszym.com Researcher, just finished PhD studying language models as applied to protein sequences. Comfortable taking on big problems and reasoning through them. Experience with mentoring, ma…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)”Submitted Five Ways I Deal with Writer's Block as a story · 1 points
HN discussionShameless plug, but I recently wrote about the pros and cons of using Mastodons powered comment sections. One of the pros is that it is super fast to set up and free in most cases. https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/
Comment linking /blog/mastodon_blog_comments/
on “Show HN: Free comments section for personal sites”Submitted Data Obfuscation in the Season 3 Finale of Mr. Robot (Spoilers) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSuper cool idea, not sure how I feel about this. The risk with URL shorteners is commonly that people get tired running them and they disappear, making the web even more brittle than before (I wrote about goo.gl doing this recently [0]). Centralization can be great here because before giving up the ghost, ethical operators of shorteners can donate their database mapping short links to full links to archivists. That'…
Comment linking /blog/archiving_googl/
on “URL shortener links stored in your ATProto PDS”https://jszym.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”
