Top all-time · #1308
thesephist
Personal blog · thesephist.com/posts · on HN as thesephistaiprogrammingphilosophy
thesephist is a personal blog at thesephist.com about ai, programming and philosophy. Since 2020, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 129 times, most often “Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (17) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for essays on personal tools, workflows and notation, and for its personal search projects such as Monocle and Lucerne, plus a list of the author's projects.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Worth a read on building tools around workflows; says he nails the core meaning of the university; Lucerne tackles Twitter concerns; projects list called intere
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 17 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-07-08
- Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-08-04
- Build your own programming language3 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-05-21
- Beyond customization: build tools that grow with us3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-12-27
- The web browser as a tool of thought3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-08-10
- Prism: Manipulating Concepts in Latent Space3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-06-22
- Hyperlink Maximalism (2022)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-07-29
- Notational Intelligence3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-01-07
- How to kill the university3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-11-24
- Towards a research community for better thinking tools3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-30
What Hacker News says?
Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools https://thesephist.com/posts/tools/ org mode has been too time-consuming in the past to adapt into my workflow. Logseq is a fantastic compromise.
Comment linking /posts/tools/
on “Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app”Submitted Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools as a story · 497 points
HN discussionHey, thanks! I used a CSS library [0] I wrote myself last year that I use for a bunch of other projects of mine, most famously lyrics.rip [1] and free.linus.zone (my free-busy calendar I wrote myself) [2]. It gives the site the "faux-3D" aesthetic. [0] https://thesephist.github.io/blocks.css/ [1] https://www.lyrics.rip [2] https://thesephist.com/posts/frieden/
Comment linking /posts/frieden/
on “Heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com”Submitted How to Find Focus as a story · 212 points
HN discussionI actually believe fairly strongly that it's not out of most people's reach! I've written before [0] about my process for learning how to build a (simple) language, and the resources that helped me do it / how I approached it. Certainly one of my favorite projects, both intellectually and from a returns perspective. There are so many great resources for building a toy language by yourself (my impl of Ink is a few th…
Comment linking /posts/pl/
on “Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools”Submitted Incremental note-taking as a story · 181 points
HN discussionMy answer your second question actually feeds into the first -- These days developing each tool is 50% taking pieces of tools / libraries I've built before and integrating them together. I've implemented a data store, a form UI, a websocket server, etc. each a few times so as I built up a collection of things I can borrow from other past projects, new projects take less time (or, I have more bandwidth to tackle more…
Comment linking /posts/how-i-side-project/
on “Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools”Submitted Build Unix, Not Uber as a story · 113 points
HN discussionAt this point I've made a habit out of building homebrew tools and languages. Very few of these are purely because I was dissatisfied with off-the-shelf solutions; many of these just exist because I thought it would be fun/educational/challenging to build an X for myself from scratch. I've made - A dynamic programming language, Ink ( https://dotink.co ), which runs in "production" (for whatever that means for side p…
Comment linking /projects/
on “Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?”Submitted The web browser as a tool of thought as a story · 110 points
HN discussionThis sounds similar to Monocle https://github.com/thesephist/monocle Demo: https://monocle.surge.sh/ Blog post explaining motivation https://thesephist.com/posts/monocle/
Comment linking /posts/monocle/
on “A Unix-style personal search engine and web crawler for your digital footprint”Submitted On Proving Yourself as a story · 97 points
HN discussionI've seen this been called a 'personal search engine' before. One person who is well known for their personal search setup is thesephist[0]. My friend is also working on an extension that uses NLP to semantically index your browsing history so that any text on the internet can be turned into a hyperlink to something else you've read[1]. [0]: https://thesephist.com/posts/monocle/ [1]: (WIP) http://espial.uzpg.me
Comment linking /posts/monocle/
on “Project Naptha”Submitted Notational Intelligence as a story · 60 points
HN discussionPeople might be interested in a project Linus Lee ( https://thesephist.com/ ) started to create a more personal adaption of using Twitter: https://thesephist.com/posts/lucerne/ It seems to tackle the main concerns people have and really focus on the aspect of reaching hard to find niches.
Comment linking /posts/lucerne/
on “Quitting Twitter”Submitted Synthesizer for Thought as a story · 58 points
HN discussionFor someone who care the implementation than the high-level design: It's written in go, interpreter-based, and pretty small [1]. Although the author seems to be a well-studied PL lover, you don't have to be like this to create a small language. It's fun experience and there are books for non-experts like [3]. - [1] https://github.com/thesephist/ink/tree/master/pkg/ink - [2] https://thesephist.com/posts/pl/ - [3] htt…
Comment linking /posts/pl/
on “Ink programming language”Submitted Liquidity of Skill as a story · 53 points
HN discussionOther "personal search engines" https://thesephist.com/posts/monocle/ written in personal language, takes multiple doc sources https://apse.io interesting because it takes periodic screenshots and performs OCR https://keminglabs.com/finda/ rust, fast, seemingly abandonded
Comment linking /posts/monocle/
on “Recoll: A desktop full-text search tool”Submitted Notational Intelligence (2022) as a story · 40 points
HN discussionI'd argue that this concept for media is most commonly known as "playlists" and unfortunately only used within data silos, e.g. a playlist of YouTube videos, a Spotify playlist, a TV season of episodes, a series of episodes, a trilogy, etc. (Yes, I'd argue that your music library of mp3 files is also kind of a silo, although portable) Heck, even a slideshow is arguably a playlist. I agree that putting a playlist-lik…
Comment linking /posts/search-vs-nav/
on “File Systems: The Original Hypermedia”Submitted How to kill the university as a story · 35 points
HN discussionsee also “Notational Intelligence” https://thesephist.com/posts/notation/ “The value of notation lies in how it enables us to work with new abstractions. With more powerful notation, we can work with ideas that would have been too complex or unwieldy without it. Equipped with better notation, we might think of solutions or hypotheses that would have been previously unthinkable. Without Arabic numerals, we don’t have…
Comment linking /posts/notation/
on “Working on a Programming Language in the Age of LLMs”Submitted Hyperlink Maximalism (2022) as a story · 15 points
HN discussionHas anyone done a (hopefully) systematic survey of the processes and software people use to store their stuff, sort of like a usesthis.com but just for storing assets, and how well that's worked over time? My guess is the successful strategies would look a lot like Brajeshwar's comment, a thoughtful plan that uses simple software and formats, some planning for the future, and, probably critically, regularly doing "d…
Comment linking /posts/monocle/
on “Ask HN: What is your approach for managing personal digital assets?”Submitted It's the programming environment, not the programming language as a story · 13 points
HN discussionDid this myself with Ink [0] and learned a lot. I also wrote about the experience on my blog [1] with links to resources I found helpful under the "Implementation" heading. [0] https://dotink.co/ [1] https://thesephist.com/posts/pl/
Comment linking /posts/pl/
on “Show HN: Learning Project: building an imperative language”Submitted Hyperlink Maximalism as a story · 9 points
HN discussionHi :) I just pushed this (very) small project. It's a note taking cli python program, which will works (at least) on python 2.4, 2.7 and 3.9. It's heavily inspired by inc[0], that I discovered in this post[1] (that was posted to hn a few months ago[2], thanks hn :)). The goal here is to store knowledge using simple txt files. If you provide a name to the cli, the txt will be saved under "name.txt", and if you keep i…
Comment linking /posts/inc/
on “Show HN: n.py − simple note taking CLI tool”Submitted “Write short sentences” is bad advice as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
