Top all-time · #9197
xlii.space
Personal blog · xlii.space · on HN as xliiprogrammingai
xlii.space is a personal blog at xlii.space about programming and ai. Since 2023, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 39 times, most often “Weird, but Haskell Feels Easy”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its Emacs-on-macOS writing, such as 'Emacs: The macOS Bug' and the story of disabled colour emoji. Comments mostly cite it, and one criticises an AI-revised article.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Weird, but Haskell Feels Easy4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-10-17
- Emacs: The macOS Bug3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-07-30
- I Hate GitHub Actions with Passion2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-01-14
- Honesty gets Emacs patch rejected2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-06-25
What Hacker News says?
> With code you get a powerful form of fact checking for free. Run the code, see if it works. Um. No. This is oversimplification that falls apart in any at minimum level system. Over my career I’ve encountered plenty of reliability caused consequences. Code that would run but side effects of not processing something, processing it too slow or processing it twice would have serious consequences - financial and person…
Comment linking /blog/network-scenarios/
on “Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes”Submitted How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads as a story · 438 points
HN discussionOh sweet summer child. http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/emacs_macos_emoji.html Color emoji was deliberately disabled on macOS (2016): policy first, parity later. Emacs 25 turned off multicolor fonts on the Cocoa port even though they worked, with a NEWS note saying they’d be re-enabled "once it is also implemented in Emacs on free operating systems." This was widely read as a political parity requirement that penalized…
Comment linking /eng/emacs-the-macos-bug/
on “Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)”Submitted Emacs: The macOS Bug as a story · 157 points
HN discussionThat's true, just as I cannot possibly measure car speed given innate measuring error which is not a defense from getting a speeding ticket. Formal proving isn't about getting to "my model is reality" but having step above mere imagination or educated guess. That's why it's possible to model paradoxical models. Given N systems they all can fail at the same time and there's nothing that can be done to guarantee messa…
Comment linking /eng/network-scenarios/
on “Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice”Submitted Talent Is Alignment as a story · 30 points
HN discussionI've made one for Phoenix (as per - it creates a cycle), though unstable compilation is a wider issue. https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/6697 In case you want to see files affected I made extended writeup on my blog - for reference. https://xlii.space/eng/elixir-cycles/
Comment linking /eng/elixir-cycles/
on “Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language”Submitted Weird, but Haskell Feels Easy as a story · 7 points
HN discussionExample: https://xlii.space/eng/from-rust-to-ruby/ The thesis that you're making is biased. Huge tech corps can move away from Rails, but it's similar to argument of "why the most successful people in the world don't drive Toyotas". Which is true, but it doesn't mean people should stop using Toyotas and buy Koenigsegg instead. Typed languages have consequences. Some designs are either non-ergonomic or impossible. Ru…
Comment linking /eng/from-rust-to-ruby/
on “Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language”Submitted Weird, but Haskell Feels Easy as a story · 6 points
HN discussionFor those who use Emacs on macOS, I highly recommend upgrading to 31.1 ASAP since several memory leaks have been fixed by Przemysław Alexander Kamiński [1] et al. [1]: Author of "Emacs: The macOS Bug" (< https://xlii.space/eng/emacs-the-macos-bug/ >), which surfaced on HN some time ago.
Comment linking /eng/emacs-the-macos-bug/
on “Emacs 31.1 will release on 8/24”Submitted Weird, but Haskell Feels Easy as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://xlii.space
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”Submitted Weird, but Haskell Feels Easy as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI formed (and am advocating) a theory that code reviews are three dimensional space exercising trust, need for control and awareness propagation. E.g. LGTM could be categorized as high trust, low control, high awareness. I'm still in process of forming it on writing mostly because I get hooked up with pathological scenarios and these are infinite source of jokes to me. Some I written down already: https://xlii.space…
Comment linking /fiction/approved_unread_shipped/
on “Many people misunderstand the purpose of code review”Submitted Falsities of LLM Negationists as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNo. Even today it is possible to use languages and programming techniques to be ultra efficient when it comes to memory. It's not that difficult to use them but the world don't care. Actual example: I have built same utility using Rust, Zig and Haskell (and Go, humorous writeup[0]). Rust binary is 450kb, Haskell binary 30mb. Zig was unfinished but I constrained memory to 512kb just for fun. Thus it's not about memor…
Comment linking /eng/the-four-language-waltz-a-tale-of-allocators-and-regret/
on “Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?”Submitted My Favorite Zig Feature as a story · 3 points
HN discussionEven though it's silent here I have a development writeup in case someone is interested :) https://xlii.space/eng/microdiagram-prototype/
Comment linking /eng/microdiagram-prototype/
on “Show HN: MicroDiagram Prototype”Submitted Writing Silly LLM Agent in Haskell as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThat's true, but acceptance is still all or nothing. When chaining commits it's possible to (for example) have a function that does THING and then have another PR that have a function that uses first one. It's somewhat PITA when team has no-dead-code hard rule, but otherwise it's quite manageable and invites rich feedback. Reviewer and feedback can focus on atomic change (in example: function that does THING) and no…
Comment linking /eng/pr_trick/
on “Git Rebase for the Terrified”Submitted State of Opinion – Programming Languages – Autumn 2025 Edition as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Maybe it's unfair, unhelpful or overdone to call out llmisms Not anywhere near as overdone as posting AI generated/revised articles to HN that are an absolute slog to read. A real shame, honestly, because the other article[1] from this blog that made it to the front page recently was good. The difference in writing style between them is striking, and I think it serves as a really good example of why I just can't s…
Comment linking /eng/i-hate-github-actions-with-passion/
on “Cue Does It All, but Can It Literate?”Submitted What the F*** did that bank do? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Show HN: Dataf*ck – An Esoteric Data Format as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Approved. Unread. Shipped as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Multi-package Haskell project with file dispersion done in Cue as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Flying Giraffe as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Honesty gets Emacs patch rejected as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Honesty Gets Emacs Patch Rejected as a story · 1 points
HN discussion