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My name is Viktor. I’m a Swedish software engineer and hypertext enjoyer. Marginalia is a website I’ve built. It’s really almost a bunch of websites on a common theme. If you find yourself clicking a link and ending up on a page that looks completely different, that’s just how things are.

🌎 Marginalia Search on GitHub
🦤 @MarginaliaNu on Twitter
🦤 @marginalia@mastodon.social
📺 @ViktorLofgren on YouTube
✉️ kontakt@marginalia.nu on Email

Site Index

Recent Updates

2026-02-25 New accounts on HN 10x more likely to use EM-dashes in weird-ai-crap

I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months. First most obvious giveaway is the frequency with which you see accounts posting brilliant insights like 13 60 well and t6ctctfuvuh7hguhuig8h88gd to f6gug7h8j8h6fzbuvubt GB I be cugttc fav uhz cb ibub8vgxgvzdrc to bubuvtxfh tf d xxx h z j gj uxomoxtububonjbk P.l.kvh cb hug tf 6 go k7gtcv8j9j7gimpiiuh7i 8ubg or 1662476506 or Аё Beyond the accounts that are visibly glitching out, the vibe is also seriously off.

2026-02-19 AI makes you boring in log

This post is an elaboration on a comment I made on Hacker News recently, on a blog post that showed an increase in volume and decline in quality among the “Show HN” submissons. I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded Show HN projects are overall pretty boring. They generally don't have a lot of work put into them, and as a result, the author (pilot?

2026-02-13 Index Compression, Query Execution Improvements in log

The Marginalia Search index has recently seen some design tweaks to make it perform better, primarily the introduction of postings list compression. Last year, the index was partially re-implemented with SSDs in mind. This was largely a success, but left some lingering issues with tail latencies that sometimes weren’t what they needed to be. To ensure predictable execution times, the query execution is provided a timeout value, after which it will wrap up and return the best results it’s found.

2026-01-31 Trust in Ranking in log

The Marginalia Search default ranking algorithm recently saw a fairly radical improvement, due to a new domain trust system that drastically reduces the number of content farm results, as long as there are human results it usually finds them across all the usual test queries. Recently fixing a few bugs that made the search engine work more correctly had the unexpected and undesired side-effect of also making it surface more search engine spam and content farm-type results.

2026-01-28 You should probably tell your audience what your blog posts are about as early as possible in log

Being clear about what your blog posts are about lets people who are interested in what you have to say find your writing more easily. The more paragraphs you spend getting to the point, the bigger the odds they’ll lose patience and click on something else before you’ve presented your thesis. When publishing articles online, no matter how obscure the subject matter, there is almost always some people who will be into what you have to say.

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