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Simon Tatham

Personal blog · chiark.greenend.org.ukprogramminggamessystems

Simon Tatham writes not the chiark home page, a personal blog at chiark.greenend.org.uk about programming, games and systems. Since 2008, 397 different Hacker News readers have linked it 566 times, most often “Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.

No feed foundVisit the blog
566mentions?
2recommend?
397HN people?
2008–2026first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 76 in 2024

Rarely recommended · 2 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?

Why HN links it

HN readers link this site mostly for Simon Tatham's puzzle collection and PuTTY pages. The writing praised is the developer documentation and the bug-report guidance.

Recommended for · 2 comments
one commenter calls the developer documentation 'absolutely amazing'; another recommends the bug-report page

Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.

Most-linked posts?

  1. Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection
    59 people · 63 mentions · first linked 2017-06-23
  2. Coroutines in C (2000)
    38 people · 46 mentions · first linked 2017-08-02
  3. Coroutines in C (Simon Tatham, 2000)
    30 people · 33 mentions · first linked 2009-08-30
  4. PuTTY 0.77 has been released (SSH/Serial/RS232/Telnet)
    21 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2020-07-04
  5. How to Report Bugs Effectively (1999)
    17 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2009-04-15
  6. PuTTY 0.63 released, fixing four security holes
    12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2008-09-07
  7. Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection
    11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2009-09-22
  8. How to Report Bugs Effectively
    10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2017-09-03
  9. /~sgtatham/putty/download.html
    9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2011-07-13
  10. /~sgtatham/puzzles/js/mines.html
    8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2018-04-08

What Hacker News says?

  1. Lemme use this opportunity to link Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ Available for linux, mobile, online and of course static-linked exe. Also as opposed to Windows Minesweeper, mines.exe is guaranteed to be solvable every time.

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/puzzles/

    on “Triple-A Minesweeper”
  2. Submitted XOR as a story · 602 points

    HN discussion
  3. Indeed. I would really love to recommend Keepass, but their website is really ugly and makes the impression of a non-polished software - even though Keepass is absolute mature and fine. On the other hand, the PuTTY website is also everything but polished, but people have always been using it. Also, I suspect that most people will get it through the third-party site "www.putty.org" instead of the real PuTTY website,…

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/putty/download.html

    on “The Dropbox hack is real”
  4. Submitted PuTTY vulnerability vuln-p521-bias as a story · 558 points

    HN discussion
  5. ArloL · 2021-10-24Recommends
    I can recommend https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/bugs.html

    on “Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux”
  6. Submitted Iconography of the PuTTY tools as a story · 400 points

    HN discussion
  7. In the same vein: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/puzzles/

    on “Show HN: I made a puzzle game that gently introduces my favorite math mysteries”
  8. Submitted The descent to C as a story · 377 points

    HN discussion
  9. I was shocked, so I went and checked and it seems like it is https. https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/releases/... has link https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.70/w64/putty.exe

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/putty/releases/0.70.html

    on “Found hooked up to my router”
  10. Submitted Git without a forge as a story · 322 points

    HN discussion
  11. Meh, other than the crossword, the other ones are fairly trivial games. Simon Tatham's puzzle pack [0] for example has 5x more games for free and ported to most platforms. [0] https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/puzzles/

    on “The New York Times buys Wordle”
  12. Submitted Coroutines in C (2000) as a story · 307 points

    HN discussion
  13. On a related note, Windows Defender detects malware when downloading the windows putty installer. Trojan: Win32/Varpes.J!plock http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.h... Not sure how to report.

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/putty/download.html

    on “Transmission BitTorrent app contained malware”
  14. Submitted Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection as a story · 274 points

    HN discussion
  15. > Every contributor is valuable, it's in the name, the definition of "contribute". No. I definitely seen people who created multitude of misleading bug reports, flood of stupid feature requests. I personally did a bit of both. There are people who do both repetitively, fill issue reports without filling requested fields. Or open issue again when their previous report was closed. I got once bug report where someone w…

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/bugs.html

    on “Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo”
  16. Submitted PuTTY 0.68 has been released as a story · 243 points

    HN discussion
  17. The main page [0] and main download [1] are HTTPS. GPG signatures are provided as well. [0] https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.ht... [1] https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/w64/putty-64bit-...

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

    on “Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10”
  18. Submitted SSH quoting as a story · 241 points

    HN discussion
  19. Thanks for pointing this out; I'd forgotten about that (having given up on Putty after discovering the difficulty of sharing configuration https://stackoverflow.com/q/13023920 ). Putty.org links to the Putty download page with a disclaimer separating promotion of Bitvise software below. The contrast in marketing language between "source code [...] developed and supported by a group of volunteers" vs. "developed and…

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/putty

    on “Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10”
  20. Submitted Possibly all the ways to get loop-finding in graphs wrong as a story · 230 points

    HN discussion
  21. Ultimately this probably helps increase the overall internet security. Although in recent years it was available from a TLS secured source [0], the putty.org site (which might or might not be operated by the maintainers) is still not https secured. Given that probably tens or hundreds of thousands downloaded it from there (imagine, getting an SSH client from an unknown source!) I'm surprised not more happened. Other…

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

    on “Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10”
  22. Submitted Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection as a story · 212 points

    HN discussion
  23. Not strictly mathematical, and maybe not exactly 5 year old difficulty (some of these are HARD) but here goes: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ There's an Android version of these puzzles and Linux packages (usually called "sgt-puzzles" or something similar). Apparently (I just found this out) they also work on the browser, which is pretty cool.

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/puzzles/

    on “Mathematical games interesting to both you and a five-year-old child”
  24. Submitted Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection as a story · 204 points

    HN discussion
  25. Like Untangle from https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ ?

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/puzzles/

    on “Functorio”
  26. Submitted Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection as a story · 200 points

    HN discussion
  27. I think this data structure is usually called a Counted B-tree https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/algorithms/cbtr... instead of range tree

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/algorithms/cbtree.html

    on “Faster CRDTs: An Adventure in Optimization”
  28. Submitted Coroutines in C (2000) as a story · 181 points

    HN discussion
  29. Not paper but maybe some readers of this thread could find interest in Simon Tatham's Puzzles: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

    Comment linking /~sgtatham/puzzles/

    on “Paper Apps”
  30. Submitted The Descent to C (2013) as a story · 156 points

    HN discussion

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