Top all-time · #3477
Robbie's Garbage, Collected
Personal blog · garbagecollected.orgprogramminggamesculture
Robbie's Garbage, Collected is a personal blog at garbagecollected.org about programming, games and culture. Since 2013, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times, most often “The Carmack Plan”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog mainly for its Carmack .plan post and its ASCII history posts, such as Four Column ASCII and the Ctrl+[ = ESC explanation. Most comments simply cite these as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Carmack Plan12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2017-10-24
- Four Column ASCII7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-01-31
What Hacker News says?
https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/ There's a table in the above link, as well as a few more details
Comment linking /2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/
on “Id Software”Submitted Four Column ASCII as a story · 569 points
HN discussionEverything old is new again: John Carmack's .plan¹: https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/ Archive: https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive ¹ https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc742
Comment linking /2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/
on “My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)”Submitted Four Column ASCII (2017) as a story · 142 points
HN discussionAlso worth noting: Ctrl+[ = ESC in ASCII, which is where the keyboard shortcut comes from. https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/
Comment linking /2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/
on “Vim's 25th anniversary and the release of Vim 8”Submitted Non-Functional Software as a story · 36 points
HN discussionBecause Ctrl+[ = ESC in ascii https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/
Comment linking /2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/
on “Vim's 25th anniversary and the release of Vim 8”Submitted How Google Authenticator Works as a story · 12 points
HN discussionBasically the .plan file revived (: [1] John Carmack was well-known for keeping his development notes and other thoughts in a .plan file[2][3] Aside: it saddens me a little how the simple idea of copying files onto a server is so many steps removed from modern "web framework" behemoths. I think some people genuinely don't know about the simpler older ways, and the pros and cons between them. [1] https://unix.stackex…
Comment linking /2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/
on “Babel is why I keep blogging with Emacs”Submitted The Carmack Plan as a story · 5 points
HN discussionfun fact: 2FA QR codes contain the secret as just part of a url. you don't need to save the binary image, just figure out what the (usually base32-encoded) secret value is, and store that. google authentcator lets you type in the base32-encoded secret (useful if your phone's camera is broken). see e.g. https://garbagecollected.org/2014/09/14/how-google-authentic...
Comment linking /2014/09/14/how-google-authenticator-works/
on “Ask HN: What is your password management solution?”Submitted The Carmack Plan as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThat's not what I'm saying at all. ASCII is just a standard for how text is encoded into binary. However it hasn't been around forever and before it there were lots of different -incompatible- standards. It was so bad that some computers would have their own proprietary character set. Some computers also didn't even have 8 bits to a byte and since a byte was the unit for each character (albeit ASCII is technically 7…
Comment linking /2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/
on “The IBM PC, Part 1 (2012)”Submitted The Carmack Plan as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBack in the day John Carmack's .plan file was my social media feed. https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/
Comment linking /2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/
on “Golden Thoughts for a New Nuclear Age – from a new biography of René Girard”Submitted Four Column ASCII (2017) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSeriously? I've kept daily logs (on and off) since around 2002 when I first discovered John Carmack's .plan files. https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/
Comment linking /2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/
on “Ask HN: Do you keep work logs, and if so, how do you use them?”Submitted The Carmack Plan (2017) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA couple of other nice links: Four Column ASCII: https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/ (and associated HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13539552 ) The Evolution of Character Codes, 1875-1968: https://archive.org/details/enf-ascii (and associated Github repo: https://github.com/e-n-f/ascii ) Bob Bemer, consider the "Father of ASCII", died in 2004 and his website has gone offlin…
Comment linking /2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/
on “ASCII table and history – Or, why does Ctrl+I insert a Tab in my terminal?”Submitted The Carmack Plan as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/
Comment linking /2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/
on “Good times create weak men”Submitted Go range loop internals as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI am a fan of the 4-column style, which what you are saying, separating into 2 bits & 5. I think it's alot more intuitive to see the modifiers in action https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/
Comment linking /2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/
on “Things Every Hacker Once Knew”Submitted Reverse Strings Like a Pro as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Logging Still Sucks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Carmack Plan as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Go Range Loop Internals as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Carmack Plan (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Four Column ASCII as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted I/O with Go: io.Pipe() as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
