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Paul's Notes
Personal blog · notes.pault.agprogrammingsystems
Paul's Notes is a personal blog at notes.pault.ag about programming and systems. Since 2013, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 23 times, most often “The Promised LAN”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-18, 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 Paul Tagliamonte's notes for his write-ups on pip and Debian/APT package managers and for The Promised LAN manifesto. One commenter called the manifesto page a more interesting read than the page it was linked from.
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.
Most-linked posts?
- The Promised LAN6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-06-16
- Musings about Debian and Python3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-09-22
- Complex for Whom?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-13
- Why I Write?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-09-20
- It's All Relative – Byes, Unicode and Timezones – Trust vs Test2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-11
What Hacker News says?
Couldn't agree more with the post. I wrote down a few of my thoughts a few weeks ago at https://notes.pault.ag/why-write/ -- I find myself scanning text to see if it's LLM before I actually engage with the content. It is getting harder to do by the day, and has slowly moved from a mental exercise (look for specific markers) into a "gut feel" based on how the pieces fit together.
Comment linking /why-write/
on “LLM Voice”Submitted Go Debian: Writing Debian tooling in Go as a story · 171 points
HN discussion> As a result, membership will never be open, and we will never have enough connected LANs to deal with the technical and social problems that start to happen with scale. This is a feature, not a bug. > This is a call for you to do the same. Build your own LAN. Connect it with friends’ homes. Remember what is missing from your life, and fill it in. Use software you know how to operate and get it running. Build slowl…
Comment linking /tpl/
on “The Promised LAN”Submitted Musings about Debian and Python as a story · 108 points
HN discussionThe page contains link to a manifesto/description: https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/ I think that's a more interesting read than the linked page.
Comment linking /tpl/
on “The Promised LAN”Submitted It's not always DNS as a story · 56 points
HN discussionVaguely related, this wonderful article by Paul Tagliamonte on how pip coexists with distro package managers (in this case APT): http://notes.pault.ag/debian-python/ Nice reminder that pip is a dev tool and should be used as such. It makes sense to be included in Python.
Comment linking /debian-python/
on “Explicit bootstrapping of pip in Python installations”Submitted The Promised LAN as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI wrote about why this was a bad idea at: http://notes.pault.ag/debian-python/ If you want a clear failure mode - if this installs requests globally, think about the chaos if you're on Debian stable, with 0.12.1, before the API break - after a pip install, you may end up with all the software on your system broken. When this happens, please don't file bugs with Debian. Thanks.
Comment linking /debian-python/
on “Butterfly: Your everyday terminal in your web browser”Submitted Using Env(1) in the Shebang as a story · 3 points
HN discussionReminds me of https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/
Comment linking /tpl/
on “Kevin Boone: The "small web" is bigger than you might think”Submitted Why I Write? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionGeneralizing the idea: https://notes.pault.ag/its-all-relative/
Comment linking /its-all-relative/
on “Pragmatic Unicode”Submitted The Promised LAN as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted BOOT2KIER as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Complex for Whom? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Domo Arigato, Mr. Debugfs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hy: the survival guide to Lisp embedded on Python as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted It's all relative as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Promised LAN Manifesto as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Complex for Whom? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hacking a projector in Hy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted It's All Relative – Byes, Unicode and Timezones – Trust vs Test as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
