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Petrus Theron
Personal blog · petrustheron.com/posts · on HN as pgtprogrammingdesign
Petrus Theron's personal blog at petrustheron.com covers programming and design. Since 2013, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Grug’s Guide to Sound”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Petrus Theron: software engineer in Cape Town. Essays, projects and a Lisp machine.
Most-linked posts?
- Grug’s Guide to Sound2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-12
What Hacker News says?
http://petrustheron.com/
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on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted Grug’s Guide to Sound as a story · 33 points
HN discussionWe did this in 2009, called it “The High Test”: http://petrustheron.com/posts/the-high-usability-test.html What is the high test? 1. Find a stoner buddy who is high and drunk. 2. Instruct them to use your service. 3. Shut up and listen to them shouting questions at you. Eliminate your inebriated testers' questions and your service will be a dream to use for sober users.
Comment linking /posts/the-high-usability-test.html
on “I'm the high QA guy. Let me test your website”Submitted Share Feelings on Facebook as a story · 11 points
HN discussionHello! I built a Chess AI also named Chessmate in high school (2005) that made it into a Minecraft mod 10 years later: http://petrustheron.com/posts/chessmate.html Java source code here: https://github.com/theronic/chessmate
Comment linking /posts/chessmate.html
on “Grandmaster-level chess without search”Submitted Don't force users to pick a username as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMaximising comparative advantage keeps popping up as a wealth creation strategy. Wrote an essay about it: http://petrustheron.com/posts/vision.html
Comment linking /posts/vision.html
on “Don't Pay to Acquire Your First Users”Submitted Grug's Guide to Sound as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYes, Datomic is the killer app for Clojure [^1]. Have a look at Datascript[^2] and Mozilla's Mentat[^3], which is basically an embedded Datomic in Rust. Hickey's Spec-ulation keynote is probably his most controversial talk, but it finally swayed me toward dynamic typing for growing large systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk The Clojure build ecosystem is tough. Ten years ago, I could not have wrangle…
Comment linking /posts/why-clojure.html
on “Idempotence: What is it and why should I care?”Submitted Visionary Domain Expertise as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe RAIblocks whitepaper is worth reading just as a reference on how a technical paper should be written. (Disclosure: I became interested in RAI on NYE and recently invested some money in it) The RAI secret sauce is the "block lattice" design where each account is its own blockchain and you only need to care about the chains you want to do business with, unless you encounter conflicts. Conflicts are resolved by pro…
Comment linking /posts/xrb-wallet-concept/
on “RaiBlocks: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network [pdf]”I wrote a post about it in 2013: http://petrustheron.com/posts/how-to-type-fast.html Key takeaway is to focus on accuracy, then speed. When you hit 95% accuracy, push on speed. Remap Caps Lock to Backspace.
Comment linking /posts/how-to-type-fast.html
on “Ask HN: Best way to increase typing speed?”When I was 17, I built a Java Chess AI for a school project called Chessmate. The AI couldn't castle or en passant, but it won a regional prize that got lost in the mail. 10 Years later, the code (which I had put on GitHub) made its way into a Minecraft mod called MineChess: http://petrustheron.com/posts/chessmate.html Source code: https://github.com/theronic/chessmate
Comment linking /posts/chessmate.html
on “I Made a Chess Library in Java”I type 85-95wpm (peaking around 130wpm) in Colemak on a Kinesis Advantage I with cherry brown keys. I documented my switch to Colemak five years ago (February 2013) and am still on it: - [7 weeks of colemak](http://petrustheron.com/posts/colemak.html) - [21 weeks of colemak](http://petrustheron.com/posts/colemak-21-weeks.html) - [Back up to speed on Colemak](http://petrustheron.com/posts/colemak-speed.html) Don't sw…
Comment linking /posts/how-to-type-fast.html
on “BEAKL – Theory and observations to find the optimal keyboard layout (2017)”Datomic was the reason I switched [^1] to Clojure as my primary language in 2014. It was a gamble, but it paid off in the end. I maintain that Clojure is the best AI-first language due to the lightning-fast iteration via the nREPL and Clojure's token efficiency. [^1]: https://petrustheron.com/posts/why-clojure.html
Comment linking /posts/why-clojure.html
on “Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links”Location: Cape Town, South Africa Remote: Yes. Willing to relocate: Yes. Technologies: Clojure/ClojureScript, Datomic, Rust, C/C++, C#, Swift, iOS. All web technologies. Résumé/CV: http://petrustheron.com . BEng Electronic engineer w/Computer Science (2010, University of Stellenbosch). Polyglot startup veteran has taken several product from concept to scale. Typically high-risk, early-stage. Currently designing remo…
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on a deleted thread