2026-02-09-reproducibility-in-blogs

Hacker News, kristjansson, 72M Points of Interest Mark Litwintschik

I always appreciate the near Literate Programming completeness of Mark’s posts, and his consistency in that over years. Every post feels like one could spin up a clean VM and end up with exactly his results just by reading along.

This is further evidence as to why I think being extremely verbose in any technical endeavor is very important. The more implicit instructions you have into setting something up, the harder is for someone to follow what exactly you’re doing and reproduce those steps. Reproducibility is as important in academic settings as it is in minor hobby projects because it makes it easier for other people to build on your work. Additionally, present you is going to forget what past you have done over a long enough period of time. Being able to instruct and direct how you set something up to other people is as important as the setup itself because one day you might be that stranger who has no idea the specific of why a decisions was made because you forgot.