Top all-time · #7571
Max Leiter
Personal blog · maxleiter.com/blog · on HN as MaxLeiterprogrammingwebai
Max Leiter's personal blog at maxleiter.com covers programming, web and ai. Since 2017, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 54 times, most often “"They're made out of weights"”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link the 'weights' post, which says people and AI models are both made out of weights, when discussing how language models work. Commenters mostly just drop the link.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A website by Max Leiter.
Most-linked posts?
- "They're made out of weights"6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-06-03
- You should be rewriting your prompts3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-09-14
- AI and the End of Honest Marketing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-13
- Implementing Notion-Styled URLs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-06-19
- Nintype (from 2014) is still the best mobile keyboard2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-23
What Hacker News says?
I'm at https://maxleiter.com , built with next.js for server-side generation but with javascript removed in the final bundle so it comes in at ~13KB cold cache. At risk of being mocked for my definition of minimalism, I tried to keep it fairly minimalist and simple while having a modern web aesthetic.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted I've been working on X11 on jailbroken iOS as a story · 403 points
HN discussionYeah, as I understand it, natural language is tokenised and vectorised, and then maths takes ahold. The model isn't limited to concepts that can be expressed in natural language. It's only once the AI gets to the output layers that natural language comes back into play. After all, they're all made out of weights[0]. 0: https://maxleiter.com/blog/weights
Comment linking /blog/weights
on “Grok 4.7”Submitted Formatting code should be unnecessary as a story · 354 points
HN discussionhttps://maxleiter.com/blog/weights
Comment linking /blog/weights
on “The baffling intelligence of a single cell (2024)”Submitted Ship Something Every Day as a story · 196 points
HN discussionI love that story and the recent 'AI' retelling of it https://maxleiter.com/blog/weights
Comment linking /blog/weights
on “What's Earth's dominant species by mass?”Submitted The Node ecosystem still has tooling problems as a story · 84 points
HN discussionHere's my solution: http://maxleiter.com Also have the same repos on my pinned repositories on github. On the site, for the projects I contribute to, I mention the majority of what I actually worked on and provide links to the PRs. Also, the "contributor" badges lead to a Github search of my name on the project.
Comment linking /
on “How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)”Submitted An Ask HN analysis: How Hacker News users host and build their sites as a story · 42 points
HN discussionI wrote a bit about this yesterday: https://maxleiter.com/blog/rewrite-your-prompts > Reason #3a: Work with the model biases, not against Another note on model biases is that you should lean into them. The tricky part with this is the only way to figure out a model's defaults is to have actual usage and careful monitoring (or have evals that let you spot it). Instead of forcing the model to behave in ways it ignores…
Comment linking /blog/rewrite-your-prompts
on “Addendum to GPT-5 system card: GPT-5-Codex”Submitted AI and the End of Honest Marketing as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI made a post yesterday where I advocated for this (with lockfiles) at https://maxleiter.com/blog/pin-dependencies but it was pointed out to me that pinning dependencies would cause duplicates in your rollup/webpack outputs. YMMV, as I haven't experienced that but haven't extensively looked into it
Comment linking /blog/pin-dependencies
on “What NPM should do to stop a new colors attack”Submitted Impressions of the Framework Laptop as a story · 7 points
HN discussionLocation: Bay Area Remote: no Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: HTML/JavaScript/CSS(jQuery, Vue, Bootstrap, Node), Java (DL4J, Spring), C Resume: https://maxleiter.com Email: hello@maxleiter.com 18 year old high school senior graduating taking first semester off, looking for a full-time internship (~August-January, flexible). I enjoy contributing to opensource software and developing tools to improve people’s l…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2018)”Submitted Talks I’ve Enjoyed as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI was procrastinating studying for finals and ended up compiling X11 for iOS. https://maxleiter.com/X11
Comment linking /X11
on “Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?”Submitted Thank u, next: Replacing Next.js with a vibe-coded framework as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI think you and the parent comment are running into a mobile feature that attempts to ensure text is legible: https://maxleiter.com/blog/mobile-browsers-resizing-font
Comment linking /blog/mobile-browsers-resizing-font
on “How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries”Submitted Rewrite Your Prompts as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThey made out of weights https://maxleiter.com/blog/weights
Comment linking /blog/weights
on “They're Made Out of Meat”Submitted You should be rewriting your prompts as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI already do, see https://maxleiter.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Good gap year activities?”Submitted Building a Blog with Next.js 13 and React Server Components as a story · 4 points
HN discussionPorted X11 to iOS https://maxleiter.com/blog/X11
Comment linking /blog/X11
on “Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?”Submitted Pin your NPM/yarn dependencies as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI can start off: https://maxleiter.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted Show HN: A lightweight JavaScript micro-library for creating collapsible lists from JSON as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThank you for your point. I don't understand why half these comments are taking this blog post seriously when it ends with "Weights helped me draft and proof this story." > Weights helped me draft and proof this story. Any HN reader here now, I encourage you to read the original ( https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s... ) in one sitting, go about your day, then read it again. Maybe make some…
Comment linking /blog/weights
on “"They're made out of weights"”Submitted Show HN: My personal site as a story · 4 points
HN discussion