Top all-time · #798
Scott Logic
Company blog · blog.scottlogic.comprogrammingwebai
Scott Logic is the company blog at blog.scottlogic.com, writing about programming, web and ai. Since 2015, 83 different Hacker News readers have linked it 185 times, most often “Show HN: A WebAssembly Powered Augmented Reality Sudoku Solver”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (27) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Scott Logic posts mainly as WebAssembly explainers (writing WASM by hand, compilers, state of WASM surveys), plus pieces on D3/SVG layout, Svelte, and Electron security.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 27 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
This blog shares Scott Logic's thoughts and ideas, covering topics across Tech, UX Design, Testing and Delivery.
Most-linked posts?
- Show HN: A WebAssembly Powered Augmented Reality Sudoku Solver5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-01-03
- Build your own WebAssembly Compiler5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-05-17
- Writing WebAssembly by Hand4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-06-25
- Re-implementing LangChain in 100 lines of code4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-05-04
- Exploring 120 years of timezones (2021)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-09-15
- In-browser transcoding of video files with FFmpeg and WebAssembly3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-11-24
- Building a WebAssembly-powered serverless platform3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-04-18
- LLMs vs. Advent of Code, AI is winning3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-12-15
- The State of WebAssembly 2023 Results3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-10-18
- Making a tic-tac-toe game with ‘randomness’ using pure HTML and CSS2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-19
What Hacker News says?
For those of you who are interested in the changing shape of the various timezones, moving to standardised offset, the rise and fall of daylight savings, I wrote a blog on the subject a little while back, "Exploring 120 years of timezones" https://blog.scottlogic.com/2021/09/14/120-years-timezone.ht...
Comment linking /2021/09/14/120-years-timezone.html
on “US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent”Submitted Down the ergonomic keyboard rabbit hole as a story · 251 points
HN discussionI am a tool creator (serious tools count of one) that created a tool out of genuine personal need, in reference to the note linked from " serious contexts of use". In my case it is in context to the state machine portion of the blog. The link to Leslie Lamport and TLA+ is informative and the initial point of my tool making was to end up with an executable specification of a state machine that could be translated to…
Comment linking /2020/12/08/finite-state-machines.html
on “We need visual programming. No, not like that”Submitted The future of WebAssembly – A look at upcoming features and proposals as a story · 209 points
HN discussionCurrently Java supports records (finalized in JDK 16) and sealed classes (JDK 17) which together work as algebraic data types; pattern matching in switch was finalized in JDK 21. The syntax is pretty sweet https://blog.scottlogic.com/2025/01/20/algebraic-data-types-...
Comment linking /2025/01/20/algebraic-data-types-with-java.html
on “The Grug Brained Developer (2022)”Submitted Show HN: Rendering One Million Datapoints with D3 and WebGL as a story · 200 points
HN discussionDon’t forget: the CERN presentation announcing the discovery of the Higgs Boson: https://blog.scottlogic.com/2012/07/05/the-higgs-boson-comic...
Comment linking /2012/07/05/the-higgs-boson-comic-sans-and-my-15-minutes-of-twitter-fame.html
on “Comic Mono”Submitted The State of WebAssembly 2022 as a story · 148 points
HN discussionThe key phrase here is "as apps go". I have never paid $25 for an app, and neither have most people. This pie chart sucks but it seems to imply that < 5% of apps are $19 or more: http://blog.scottlogic.com/2014/03/20/app-store-analysis.htm...
Comment linking /2014/03/20/app-store-analysis.html
on “Training Your Brain So That You Don’t Need Reading Glasses (2017)”Submitted NoJS – Creating a calculator with only HTML and CSS as a story · 138 points
HN discussionAgreed, embeddings are a very useful tool. Started using them for article recommendations on our blog a few years ago, with a measured increase in engagement: https://blog.scottlogic.com/2022/02/23/word-embedding-recomm...
Comment linking /2022/02/23/word-embedding-recommendations.html
on “Embeddings are underrated (2024)”Submitted Writing a CHIP-8 Emulator with Rust and WebAssembly as a story · 137 points
HN discussionRunning a large list of dependencies controlled by someone else. Stores data on disk unencrypted. Stores code that gets executed, on disk in text form unencrypted and unsigned. Executes code while running directly from a website (github). All in all an order of magnitude less security then a native app to put it mildly. http://blog.scottlogic.com/2016/03/09/As-It-Stands-Electron-...
Comment linking /2016/03/09/As-It-Stands-Electron-Security.html
on “Felony – An open-source PGP keychain”Submitted Exploring 120 years of timezones (2021) as a story · 95 points
HN discussionYes, I thought this would be interesting too, check this out: http://blog.scottlogic.com/2015/11/18/d3-ascii.html
Comment linking /2015/11/18/d3-ascii.html
on “Show HN: Ascii to SVG”Submitted Writing a Chip-8 Emulator with Rust and WebAssembly (2017) as a story · 93 points
HN discussionJust remember that when the CERN announced they finally could prove the existence of the Higgs boson, they did it using Comic Sans https://blog.scottlogic.com/2012/07/05/the-higgs-boson-comic...
Comment linking /2012/07/05/the-higgs-boson-comic-sans-and-my-15-minutes-of-twitter-fame.html
on “Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri”Submitted Code generating a WebAssembly 6502 emulator from specifications as a story · 71 points
HN discussionLLM's did well: https://blog.scottlogic.com/2024/12/15/llms-vs-aoc.html
Comment linking /2024/12/15/llms-vs-aoc.html
on “Meta is killing off its AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles”Submitted Building a Complex Financial Chart with D3 and d3fc as a story · 59 points
HN discussionHaving used Svelte for a couple of projects [1][2], I love it. Compared to my day job working in react/redux, it is much simpler, and feels like it has far less boilerplate. There are certainly a few rough edges, but it's all related to the immaturity of the language. Specifically, I had a hard time understanding transitions and it wasn't at all obvious how to integrate it with D3. Hopefully as it grows we will see…
Comment linking /2020/02/17/minesweeper-optimisation.html
on “Why Svelte is our choice for a large web project”Submitted Common accessibility problems, and how to fix them as a story · 55 points
HN discussionThere's an example of that here: https://blog.scottlogic.com/2020/11/23/ffmpeg-webassembly.ht... <ctrl-f>Creating a Streaming Transcoder
Comment linking /2020/11/23/ffmpeg-webassembly.html
on “FFmpeg for browser and Node, powered by WebAssembly”Submitted LLMs Don't Know What They Don't Know–and That's a Problem as a story · 54 points
HN discussionThanks for sharing pmabanugo, a couple of those posts are new to me too. If you’re taking submissions, I’ve been exploring how to make the most of these tools for the past few months, here’s my latest post: https://blog.scottlogic.com/2025/05/08/new-tools-new-flow-th...
Comment linking /2025/05/08/new-tools-new-flow-the-cognitive-shift-of-ai-powered-coding.html
on “Peer Programming with LLMs, for Senior+ Engineers”Submitted Exploring 120 Years of Timezones as a story · 50 points
HN discussionSVG is a really underrated medium. The only thing I miss compared to HTML is flexboxes (but there's always stuff like react-flexbox-svg [1]). [1]: https://github.com/metabolize/react-flexbox-svg Edit: for a React-less implementation, see https://blog.scottlogic.com/2015/02/02/svg-layout-flexbox.ht...
Comment linking /2015/02/02/svg-layout-flexbox.html
on “Show HN: A GitHub business card generator”Submitted Creating personalised data stories with GPT-3 as a story · 47 points
HN discussionI’m working in biotech. I think creating “curated” materialized views with dbt + datawarehouse or duck db + using webgl with d3 will be best long term solution https://blog.scottlogic.com/2020/05/01/rendering-one-million... . Matplotlib works well for static plots. Altair and others freeze at around 4000 data points, which is crazy. Streamlit + matplotlib is impossible to maintain but is quick to get up and running.
Comment linking /2020/05/01/rendering-one-million-points-with-d3.html
on “Scientific Visualization: Python + Matplotlib (2021)”Submitted AI's Biggest Flaw? The Blinking Cursor Problem as a story · 42 points
HN discussion
