Update for the week ending on Friday, Sep 19, 2025

mtlynch.io

• Published new blog post, “I Once Appeared in The Old New Thing”

Refactoring English

• Continued working on blog post about influential software essays
• Started blog review for a new freelance client
• Reached out to two customers on the mailing list
• Fixed a bug on HN Popularity Contest

ScreenJournal

ScreenJournal is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

• Vibe-coded a rough draft change to show season-specific TV show posters
• Updated clinerules for the repo

HN Observer

HN Observer is a tool I’m working on to predict the outcome of submissions to Hacker News based on historical data.

• Added a view to aggregate submission rate and success rate by hour of day
  • Example
  • Success rate is much smoother than I expected. My subjective experience is that it’s easier to get on the front page on weekends or at night, but in the real data, the difference is within the noise.

Misc

• Co-hosted Western Mass Indie Founders meetup
• Tried updating my zig VS Code flake to Zig 0.15.1, but ZLS seems to have broken.
• Shopped for a new streaming device
  • Mine was from 2016 and seemed to not support H.264 so my NAS server was struggling to transcode all streaming video on demand
  • Ended up getting Roku Streaming Stick Plus
  • It’s super cheap and seems to do what I need
  • Apparently, there are hidden settings to remove ads and default apps, which were my biggest issue with the Roku
  • Still am experiencing hangs when I stream from Jellyfin…
• Submitted a PR to AirGradient to eliminate trailing whitespace in source files