Update for the week ending on Friday, Aug 22, 2025
mtlynch.io
- Started writing “Gift Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple’s Email Domain”
- Wrote most of it
- Wrote a design spec for a cartoon
- Fix dead link to zimbatm
- Fixed dead links to TinyPilot
- And fixed them again
Refactoring English
- Worked on “Get to the Point” chapter
- Started editing the interview with a blogger I recorded a year ago
- Lots of bumps along the way
- Have to re-learn how to use Shotcut, which seems to always put settings and controls in the last place I’d think to look
- Riverside’s recordings had one side of the interview’s audio way skewed, so I couldn’t use their merged copy
- Edited the individual copies and figured out how to use ffmpeg to re-encode the video with the audio shifted
- Couldn’t find a way of doing this in Shotcut without creating an extra track to manage
- It turns out there were birds chirping in the background on my end, and I had a hard time getting any of Shotcut’s noise filters to work.
- I should have done it in ffmpeg, but by the time I realized, I was already partway through editing.
- Added a sample of my blog editing work
- Added my contact details to the website
- Began working on visualizations for feedback responses to my chapter survey
- Added notes for a design docs chapter
HN popularity contest
- Updated HN Popularity contest data
- I hadn’t updated the data since April, and it required manual updates
- Added code to auto-refresh on the second of every month
- Added a timestamp file to track the timestamp of the most recent story we’ve ingested so we show the correct date in the UI date filter controls.
- Added metadata for various domains
- Updated metadata for timsh
- Added various domain excludes
- Excluded csoonline.com
- Excluded tokyoweekender.com
- Excluded yle.fi
- Fixed upload script so we always overwrite on server
- I was using FTP with
--ignore-timebut that didn’t work when the two files had the exact same size. - Bunny only does uploads with FTP and doesn’t support atomic replacement.
- I was using FTP with
- Canonicalized URLs for collegetowns.org
Hit the Front Page of Hacker News
- Someone reported to me that my slides were showing up on Google search results even though they said, “Don’t share this with anyone!”
- I don’t really care that they’re public since they’re not a replacement for the course, but it felt sloppy to leave them exposed, so I added a
robots.txtto block search engine indexing. - I also couldn’t even remember where I was hosting them because I last touched the slides four years ago. I tracked them down to Firebase Hosting, deleted that project, and moved to Netlify where I host everything else.
- I don’t really care that they’re public since they’re not a replacement for the course, but it felt sloppy to leave them exposed, so I added a
HN Observer
HN Observer is a tool I’m working on to predict the outcome of submissions to Hacker News based on past historical data.
- Refactored some DuckDB code that I realized was two separate function calls that should be a single transaction.
- Added a panic if the caller tries to store a zero-length slice in DuckDB.
PicoShare
Misc
- Co-hosted Western Mass Indie Founders meetup
- Visited a butterfly conservatory
- Got my AirGradient indoor monitors mostly working and logging to a Grafana dashboard