Readit NewsThis project reminds me of Matt Might's work (predating LLMs) on using techniques from Precision Medicine to help his son, who had a rare disease.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt3XyeFHvt4 (poorly transcribed here: https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/algorithm-for-precisio...)
If I recall correctly, he used miniKanren along with formalized, structured data extracted from medical research. Unfortunately, his son has since passed away.
Note that this article is by the same Greg Egan who wrote Permutation City, a (in my opinion) really good, deeply technical, hard science fiction novel exploring consciousness, computation, and the infinite nature of the universe.
If that sounds interesting, I recommend not reading too much about the book before starting it; there are spoilers in most synopses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
You don't necessarily need a background in programming and theoretical computer science to enjoy it. But you'll probably like it better if you already have some familiarity with computational thinking.
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jstrieb commented on Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News hsu.cy/2025/09/how-to-rea... · Posted by u/firexcy
I use Chrome as my main browser and was going to ask if there was a Chrome version. I was sad to see there's a technical reason you couldn't make it work :(
Probably worth me revisiting! Web tech has changed a bit since I last investigated this in 2021, and I'm also not sure if I considered options like IndexedDB at the time.
jstrieb commented on Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News hsu.cy/2025/09/how-to-rea... · Posted by u/firexcy
This post recommends the Newsit extension to view Hacker News discussion associated with a page.
In the same vein, a few years ago, I made a Firefox extension for users who want a privacy-preserving way to see if pages have associated HN discussion:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-d...
Most other extensions probably hit an external API (such as Algolia) to check submission status, which means they send every page you visit to that API. Instead, my extension uses Bloom filters compiled from every link ever submitted (updated daily from the Hacker News BigQuery dataset) to check the current page's submission status. By using Bloom filters, my extension only hits the API when you click the button to view the discussion.
Source code here:
https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button
Feel free to pull the Bloom filters from the "Releases" section of that repo on GitHub to use in other projects if you'd like!
(By help I mean just help, not write an entire sloppy article.)
The main one is to set reader expectations that any errors are entirely my own, and that I spent time reviewing the details of the work. The disclosure seemed to me a concise way to do that -- my intention was not any form of anti-AI virtue signaling.
The other reason is that I may use AI for some of my future work, and as a reader, I would prefer a disclosure about that. So I figured if I'm going to disclose using it, I might as well disclose not using it.
I linked to other thoughts on AI just in case others are interested in what I have to say. I don't stand to gain anything from what I write, and I don't even have analytics to tell me more people are viewing it.
All in all, I was just trying to be transparent, and share my work.