Top all-time · #1183
Luke Smith
Personal blog · lukesmith.xyz/articlesphilosophypolitics
Luke Smith's personal blog at lukesmith.xyz covers philosophy and politics. Since 2020, 58 different Hacker News readers have linked it 68 times, most often “I Use the GPL and Not Cuck Licenses”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (27) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for opinionated writing on free software and licensing (GPL versus permissive), privacy coins, RSS and Linux/Vim. Some commenters link his vegan and GDP articles, and others criticise them.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- A 'big fan' of its opinion on GPL versus permissive licences; summarises the issues with Monero and privacy coins; the site's design direction is liked.
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.
Luke Smith's webpage with links to his videos and software projects and many written articles and personal pages.
Most-linked posts?
- I Use the GPL and Not Cuck Licenses13 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2022-07-25
- Why I Use the GPL7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-07-12
- Every web browser sucks (2021)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-08-28
- Using RSS to replace social media2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-12-18
- Matrix vs. XMPP2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-07-07
- Blockchain Blasphemy and the Technological Antichrist2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-12-11
- Science of the Gaps2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-09-21
- /articles/vegan2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-03-11
- /blog2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-27
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-27
What Hacker News says?
https://lukesmith.xyz/ -- very opinionated, but interesting person https://martin.kleppmann.com/archive.html - reading about distributed systems and db are extremely interesting https://danluu.com/ - his metrics articles is how I found him out, but other articles really good too. https://paulefou.com/ -- This is my blog. I write about self-development for software engineers and my experience with different strategie…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Using RSS to replace social media as a story · 241 points
HN discussion> https://lukesmith.xyz/blog Luke Smith has some interesting ideas about free software and his Linux/Vim tutorials are very good. However, he's someone who harbors a lot of racist and hateful views. Don't believe me? Watch his livestreams. His recent crusade to get many people on Monero likely stems from him getting busted[1] for accepting a $30,000 donation in Bitcoin from a French white nationalist who donated[2]…
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Parable of Alien Chess as a story · 139 points
HN discussionMiscellaneous technical stuff: - https://danluu.com/ - https://blog.jessfraz.com/ - https://adamwathan.me/ - https://jvns.ca/ - https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ - https://dankim.org/ - https://mtlynch.io/ - https://rgz.ee/ - https://markdotto.com/ - https://thorstenball.com/ - https://sarahdrasnerdesign.com/writing/ - https://lukesmith.xyz/ - Quirky minimalist linux & free software stuff. I don't agree with many of his…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Basically Everyone Should Be Avoiding Docker as a story · 95 points
HN discussion- https://greyenlightenment.com - https://www.joelonsoftware.com - https://meltingasphalt.com - https://lukesmith.xyz/blog
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Science vs. Soyence as a story · 48 points
HN discussionI'm with Luke Smith [1] when it comes to non-copyleft licenses like MIT. Andrew Tanenbaum of the MINIX fame was similarly surprised to find that Intel had quietly included the OS he wrote in Intel chips, making it perhaps the most widely used OS in the world. He seemed disappointed no one ever reached out to him to tell him about it [2] [1]: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc... [2]: https:…
Comment linking /articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuck-licenses/
on “I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me”Submitted Notes on Learning Languages as a story · 45 points
HN discussionWhat's your take on this analysis? https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp It seems like the connection to Amdocs and their interest in collecting metadata for surveillance is a stain on the privacy-focused image.
Comment linking /articles/matrix-vs-xmpp
on “Element raises $30M to boost Matrix”Submitted Disenchantment with the Post-AI Internet as a story · 40 points
HN discussion> 1. when I feel that urge during the workday, my emotional brain thinks "oh boy! a whole hour of this at the end of the day! I can totally wait because it will be an hour!" 2. when that hour comes, I find I only browse around for maybe 10 minutes before I get bored. This happened to me when I moved all my YouTube / News-Aggregator consoomption to checking RSS feeds[0] once a week - I went from watching hours of vid…
Comment linking /blog/a-guide-to-using-rss-to-replace-social-media
on “How to overcome Phone Addiction”Submitted Modern “Freedom” Means Being a Slave to Impulses as a story · 17 points
HN discussionHis blog is pretty crazy https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/vegan > Long story short, a bugman is someone who rejects the purpose and role of humans in their natural environment. They reject tradition, religion, their family, gender roles. Ah, I can smell the rank mold from here. > you're given for your acceptance some inane religious platitudes like "equality" and "rights" along with vaguely Marxist notions of "exploit…
Comment linking /articles/vegan
on “Based Cooking”Submitted Only Use Old Computers as a story · 16 points
HN discussionLittle heads up for all searching vegan receipts there. The author has an article named "Veganism is the Pinnacle of Bugmanism" on his personal webpage: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/vegan
Comment linking /articles/vegan
on “Based Cooking”Submitted I Use the GPL and Not Cuck Licenses as a story · 7 points
HN discussionFrom Luke Smith's post on GDP: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-its-bad-to-have-high-gdp/ "GDP is only a measurement of how reliant a place or country is on the global economy. Self-sufficiency has a GDP of 0. Wasteful consooomerism has an extremely large GDP."
Comment linking /articles/why-its-bad-to-have-high-gdp/
on “Gross domestic product is a misleading measure of national success (2014)”Submitted I Use the GPL and Not Cuck Licenses (2022) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThis article summarizes the issues: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/monero-and-other-privacy-coin...
Comment linking /articles/monero-and-other-privacy-coins
on “Why Monero”Submitted You should only be using an old computer as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> For a while already I had the idea of building a "diet social media" software that would display information from e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other platforms without gamified addiction mechanisms. This already exists. It's called RSS. https://lukesmith.xyz/blog/a-guide-to-using-rss-to-replace-s... The only major issue with RSS is a dearth of decent feed-reader software. I personally use newsboat[0], but e…
Comment linking /blog/a-guide-to-using-rss-to-replace-social-media
on “Twitter cut off the ability to read a tweet by fetching its URL with a HTTP GET”Submitted Every web browser sucks (2021) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI disagree. Work on permissively licensed software typically has the net effect of decreasing global freedom by reducing the costs of corporations to produce proprietary software. I try to avoid contributing to permissively-licensed software when possible, and I prefer to co-operate with businesses that use free software to avoid vendor lock-in as much as possible. Why should we all do free work for corporations? At…
Comment linking /articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuck-licenses/
on “FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop”Submitted Consciousness Is Not Physical as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI came across this analysis of that incident: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc... I'm not sure how I feel about it yet.
Comment linking /articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuck-licenses
on “Show HN: My 486 Server”Submitted Why I use the GPL and not cuck licenses as a story · 4 points
HN discussion"unJewgled Chromium"[1] was the first one that came to mind. He's normally a little bit more subtle, but I guess he was feeling randy that time. I'm not going to dig further through his blog posts (they're insufficiently interesting from a technological perspective; mostly longform versions of what someone with only opinions from 4chan would write), but you're welcome to. [1]: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/every-we…
Comment linking /articles/every-web-browser-absolutely-sucks
on “Using RSS to replace social media”Submitted Science of the Gaps as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
