Top all-time · #1358
Ian Bicking
Personal blog · ianbicking.org/blog · on HN as ianbickingprogrammingstartupscareer
Ian Bicking's personal blog at ianbicking.org covers programming, startups and career. Since 2013, 51 different Hacker News readers have linked it 91 times, most often “Design Notes on LLM-driven text adventure”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (21) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ian Bicking's blog for posts on Python, Smalltalk, PHP and Smarty templating, and Mozilla, plus a text adventure built from a book and AI array experiments.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- One commenter calls a post a really interesting read; another praises Ian's prose and code as among the best they have read.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 21 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Design Notes on LLM-driven text adventure4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-07-04
- Professional Transitions4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-09-16
- Infinite AI Array4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-01-02
- Firefox Was Always Enough3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-11-18
- Where Smalltalk Went Wrong (2004)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-12-25
- How to use GitHub issues?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-03-19
- Thoughts on Voice Interfaces2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-08-03
- Improving the web with small, composable tools2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-02-05
- /blog/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-03-24
- The overuse of functions2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-10-24
What Hacker News says?
I find this is fairly easy to do by making both sides of the disagreement third-person and prompting it as a dialog writing exercise. This is akin to how GPT-3 implemented chat. So you do something like: You will be helping the user write a dialog between two characters, Mr Contrarian and Mr Know-It-All. The user will write all the dialog for Mr Know-It-All and you will write for Mr Contrarian. Mr Contrarian likes t…
Comment linking /blog/2024/04/roleplaying-by-llm
on “GPT-4o”Submitted Firefox Was Always Enough as a story · 1000 points
HN discussionSomething along those lines was also on my (more vague) list of goals: http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2018/02/web-small-composable-... At least in my mind that would involve a kind of holding space separate from files (but serving some of those purposes). It's going to involve a lot of large, structured data, remote resources, and potentially "live" entities (like an open tab). All of which are still manipulable ent…
Comment linking /blog/2018/02/web-small-composable-tools.html
on “Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked to Try”Submitted Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money as a story · 724 points
HN discussionJust hire competent and trustworthy designers, instead of purposefully crippling the tools you spend so much time developing. The best designers can also code, and if you design a system that discourages instead of encourages designers from coding, you're wasting the potential of those precious coder/designers, and wasting the opportunity to train your best designers to code too. It's not as if Rock Star can't find…
Comment linking /php-ghetto.html
on “GTA VI Leak [video]”Submitted Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked to Try as a story · 501 points
HN discussionI strongly agree Smarty is beyond terrible (and I've used it and read the source code, so I know its problems first hand) and the fact that it even exists is indicitive of deep flaws in PHP, but I don't believe Rasmus has ever realized that he did anything wrong. He just doesn't care. "We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told y…
Comment linking /php-ghetto.html
on “25 Years of PHP”Submitted Saying goodbye to Python as a story · 376 points
HN discussionOne of the most ridiculous examples of this was the Smarty templating language for PHP. Somebody got the silly idea in their head of implementing a templating language in PHP, even though PHP is ALREADY a templating language. So they took out all the useful features of PHP, then stuck a few of them back in with even goofier inconsistent hard-to-learn syntax, in a way that required a code generation step, and made te…
Comment linking /php-ghetto.html
on “YAML: Probably not so great after all”Submitted “Users want control” is a shoulder shrug as a story · 285 points
HN discussion> So I take it this means that Mozilla is reopening "Mozilla Labs". No. Mozilla Research and Mozilla Labs were distinct entities. From http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2014/09/professional-transiti... : "Note that Mozilla Labs is distinct from Mozilla Research – Research is the home of projects like Rust and ASM.js. Mozilla Research is still going strong. To make a broad distinction between the two groups: Research ha…
Comment linking /blog/2014/09/professional-transitions.html
on “Mozilla Research Projects”Submitted Thoughts on Voice Interfaces as a story · 153 points
HN discussionSo Python 2 did not have super obvious string handling. One of the odd things that they seemingly could have fixed pretty easily is to change the default encoding from 'ascii' to 'utf8'. That would have fixed a bunch of the UnicodeDecodeErrors that were the most obvious problem with strings: http://www.ianbicking.org/illusive-setdefaultencoding.html If they had to make Python 3 anyway, I think the main thing they we…
Comment linking /illusive-setdefaultencoding.html
on “Why Python 3 Exists”Submitted The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker as a story · 153 points
HN discussionIt's useful when you want a sentinel object and you don't want to use None as the sentinel because it is a valid value. Some discussion here: http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2008/12/the-magic-sentinel.ht...
Comment linking /blog/2008/12/the-magic-sentinel.html
on “Weird Python Integers”Submitted Why Isn’t Programming Futuristic? as a story · 133 points
HN discussionYeah. http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2014/09/professional-transiti... "It’s a little hard to tell – I guess we didn’t actually shutter anything, and though it was announced internally it is entirely unclear externally. But Mozilla Labs is definitely shut down."
Comment linking /blog/2014/09/professional-transitions.html
on “Mozilla Brick”Submitted Where Smalltalk Went Wrong (2004) as a story · 73 points
HN discussionwth is going on at mozilla? There seems to be a lot of excitement to create stuff, without much attention to whether it's needed .. or where the lifecycle goes beyond creation. http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2014/09/professional-transiti...
Comment linking /blog/2014/09/professional-transitions.html
on “Mozilla Brick”Submitted Being a Manager Is Lonely as a story · 59 points
HN discussion>Many competing frameworks acted like this wasn't so, and stuck to the old practice of using templates. They missed the obvious lesson here: every templating language inevitably turns into a very poor programming language over time. It will grow to add conditionals, loops, scopes, macros, and other things that are much nicer in actual code. A templating language is mainly an inner platform effect. It targets a weird…
Comment linking /php-ghetto.html
on “Get in zoomer, we're saving React”Submitted Conway's Corollary as a story · 46 points
HN discussionI found the post [0] to be a really interesting read, and as one susceptible to solipsism and the simulation hypothesis, this paragraph hit me hard: > My biggest difficulty was getting ChatGPT to understand the constraints of the game. It may have been harder because an LLM’s constraints are so close to a text adventure, and it is used to imagining something less constrained; like it couldn’t distinguish between its…
Comment linking /blog/2025/07/intra-llm-text-adventure
on “Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game”Submitted TogetherJS as a Postmodern Programming Tool as a story · 46 points
HN discussionI went to some lengths to ground the action in my game: https://ianbicking.org/blog/2025/07/intra-llm-text-adventure That said, I think there's a lot of prompting techniques that can help here. (Actually the Guided Thinking section is an example of prompt-only techniques: https://ianbicking.org/blog/2025/07/intra-llm-text-adventure... ) You must at least do some pre- and post-processing to have the LLM consume and g…
Comment linking /blog/2025/07/intra-llm-text-adventure
on “Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game”Submitted World Building with GPT as a story · 30 points
HN discussionEveryone has to walk on eggshells around anything that might affect the Google search deal, but that's mostly it. If anything the Google money is resented, even though it also funds everything. IMHO leadership always lacked imagination around Firefox, and never had the fortitude to back any alternate investment enough for it to succeed. More generally I wrote a blog post with my interpretation: https://www.ianbickin…
Comment linking /blog/2020/11/firefox-was-always-enough.html
on “Servo Engine contributions this year”Submitted Where Smalltalk Went Wrong, Part 2 as a story · 17 points
HN discussionI kind of like NPS: it doesn't try to make sophisticated distinctions, and distinguishes between enthusiasm and acceptable mediocrity. It's oriented towards growth because of that emphasis on enthusiasm. The very low end of the scale doesn't really matter, as many of the people who score the product very low have already stopped using the product, so grouping 0 responses with 5 responses seems reasonable to me. But…
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/product-journal-data-up-and-data-down.html
on “Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful”Submitted Professional Transitions as a story · 16 points
HN discussion
