Top all-time · #776
Hynek Schlawack
Personal blog · hynek.me/articlesprogrammingweb
Hynek Schlawack's personal blog at hynek.me covers programming and web. Since 2011, 83 different Hacker News readers have linked it 129 times, most often “Python App Deployment with Native Packages”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-09-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (29) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Hynek Schlawack's posts on Python packaging and deployment, uv containers, Docker signals and TLS cipher hardening, and cite them as sources in comments.
- Recommended for · 15 comments
- Called a great uv container guide, a decent pip-tools summary, a useful cipher guide, and a start-here read.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 29 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Hynek Schlawack: Pythonista, Gopher, blogger, speaker, and YouTuber from Berlin / Germany.
Most-linked posts?
- Python App Deployment with Native Packages6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-12-06
- Python Application Dependency Management in 20185 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-11-29
- (2013 – present) SSL hardening advice5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-04-18
- A case for putting packages into a separate “src" directory in python projects4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-11-04
- TIL: You Can Stop Updating Copyright Attribution Years (2021)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-01-01
- Subclassing in Python Redux4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-06-22
- Don’t mock what you don’t own4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-06-21
- Why I Like Nox4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-01-18
- Storing Passwords in a Highly Parallelized World4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-01-06
- Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-03-02
What Hacker News says?
Breaking changes don't break everyone. For many projects, only a small fraction of users are broken any given time. Firefox is on version 139 (similarly Chrome and other web browsers); how many times have you had to reinstall your plugins and extensions? For that matter, have you seen any Python unit tests written before the Pytest 8 release that were broken by it? I think even ones that I wrote in the 6.x era would…
Comment linking /articles/semver-will-not-save-you
on “Fun with uv and PEP 723”Submitted I’m a productive programmer with a memory of a fruit fly as a story · 650 points
HN discussionUsing a binary package with pip requires "a compiler and all of the development libraries", which GP said he doesn't want to do. Personally I gave up a while ago and now I do "apt-get build-essential python-dev" on every new server, but it's not ideal. I really like the approach outlined in https://hynek.me/articles/python-app-deployment-with-native-... , but haven't gotten around to implementing it.
Comment linking /articles/python-app-deployment-with-native-packages/
on “About Python 3”Submitted On Conference Speaking as a story · 400 points
HN discussionDavid Beazley : http://www.dabeaz.com/ Kenneth Reitz : https://www.kennethreitz.org/ Armin Ronacher : http://lucumr.pocoo.org/ Julien Danjou : https://julien.danjou.info/ Hynek Schlawack : https://hynek.me/ Donald Stufft : https://caremad.io/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”Submitted Python Deployment Anti-Patterns as a story · 293 points
HN discussionNot an expert on Nix, but it's not so much that Nix has problems (though I'm sure it does, my initial research suggested it's not quite there yet for Python packages) but that there other things you need to get right. For example: 1. Signal handling (only one bit of https://hynek.me/articles/docker-signals/ is Dockerfile specific, the rest still applies.) 2. Configuring servers to run correctly in Docker environment…
Comment linking /articles/docker-signals/
on “Simple Dockerfile examples are often broken by default”Submitted Design Pressure: The Invisible Hand That Shapes Your Code as a story · 212 points
HN discussionThe form you propose runs `command`, which may have undesired side-effects. I always thought `which` to be standard, but TIL `command` (sh builtin) is[0]. [0]: https://hynek.me/til/which-not-posix/
Comment linking /til/which-not-posix/
on “Techniques I use to create a great user experience for shell scripts”Submitted Python 3 in 2016 as a story · 184 points
HN discussionThose pages are managed by the "PyPA" group, not technically python.org itself, although they were given a subdomain there. Start here and follow the links for more info: https://hynek.me/articles/python-app-deps-2018/
Comment linking /articles/python-app-deps-2018/
on “If this project is dead, just tell us”Submitted Python Application Deployment with Native Packages as a story · 180 points
HN discussionThose pages are managed by the "PyPA" group, not technically python.org itself, although they were given a subdomain there. Start here and follow the links for more info: https://hynek.me/articles/python-app-deps-2018/
Comment linking /articles/python-app-deps-2018/
on “If this project is dead, just tell us”Submitted Storing Passwords in a Highly Parallelized World as a story · 167 points
HN discussionWell my team does that for one. We use Python packaging ecosystem, specify Python dependencies using standard tools like setup.py, requirements.txt and pip. All Python dependencies are baked into a fat Python package using PEX format[1]. Also tried Facebook's xar format[2], without success yet. What matters is to have a statically linked dependencies packaged in one executable file. Like a Windows exe file. Then you…
Comment linking /articles/python-app-deployment-with-native-packages/
on “Goodbye Docker and Thanks for all the Fish”Submitted Don’t mock what you don’t own as a story · 166 points
HN discussionalso a great guide for building production-ready containers using uv: https://hynek.me/articles/docker-uv/
Comment linking /articles/docker-uv/
on “Switching Pip to Uv in a Dockerized Flask / Django App”Submitted Which is not Posix as a story · 109 points
HN discussionHynek, a CPython committer, had written a blog post[1] the state of Python application dependencies in 2018, updated in 2019 (no change in 2020, I asked). It was also surfaced on HN 3 times but did not get much attention[2] [1]: https://hynek.me/articles/python-app-deps-2018/#petry [2]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=python-app-deps-2018
Comment linking /articles/python-app-deps-2018/
on “Python Pip 20.3 Released with new resolver”Submitted Subclassing in Python Redux as a story · 101 points
HN discussionThere was an interesting article 2 months ago that was trending on HN [0] with a good discussion [1]. - [0] https://hynek.me/articles/speaking/ - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14450905
Comment linking /articles/speaking/
on “Ask HN: How do you start giving tech talks?”Submitted Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You as a story · 75 points
HN discussionShouldn't some AI be able to clean that up for you? This seems something LLMs should be well-suited for. --- FWIW, I'm the speaker and let me be honest with you: I'm super unmotivated to write nowadays. In the past, my usual MO was writing a bunch of blog posts and submit the ones that resonated to CfPs (e.g. < https://hynek.me/articles/python-subclassing-redux/ > → < https://hynek.me/talks/subclassing/ >). However,…
Comment linking /talks/subclassing/
on “Design Pressure: The Invisible Hand That Shapes Your Code”Submitted Waiting in Asyncio as a story · 71 points
HN discussionI came to the comments to say exactly this. There's a decent summary of why someone might still prefer pip-tools even in a world where pipenv and poetry exist here: https://hynek.me/articles/python-app-deps-2018/ For my purposes, the primary downside of this approach is that adding dependencies takes slightly more effort, because you have to edit a file and then execute a shell command, rather than just executing a…
Comment linking /articles/python-app-deps-2018/
on “Overview of Python dependency management tools”Submitted Hardening your Web Server's SSL Ciphers as a story · 65 points
HN discussionBuilding Docker images is a tricky design problem, as with many ops tasks. The problem is due to 3 issues: 1. A Docker image is the intersection of literally 50 years of technology, starting from Unix in the 1970s, none of which are perfect. Decisions from back then still have an impact, e.g. you need to get signal handling right if you want shutdown to work ( https://hynek.me/articles/docker-signals/ ). 2. Getting…
Comment linking /articles/docker-signals/
on “Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles”Submitted Taking some pain out of Python logging as a story · 64 points
HN discussionIf you are making SSL requests with Python you will want to use service_identity[0] to perform certificate validation. Hynek has some good information on his blog[1]. [0]: https://github.com/pyca/service_identity [1]: https://hynek.me/talks/tls/
Comment linking /talks/tls/
on “Firefox 32 Supports Public Key Pinning”Submitted Road to the Python Commit Bit as a story · 63 points
HN discussion
