www.marginalia.nu

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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

2026-03-30 An NSFW filter for Marginalia Search in log

… optional, that is.

I’ve been working on an NSFW filter for Marginalia Search, as that is something some people have asked for, primarily API consumers.

The search engine has had some domain based filtering for a while, based on the UT1 lists, but that isn’t a very comprehensive approach.

We’ll land on a single hidden layer neural network approach, implemented from scratch, but before landing on that, many other things were tried along the way.

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. Lots of comments that are incredibly banal, or oddly off topic. Hard to really put a finger on how, but I had the idea of scraping /newcomments and /noobcomments to see if I could make sense of it. First is for comments that are recently made, and the second is for comments that are recently made by newly registred accounts.

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?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space, and so there isn't really much of a discussion to be had.

The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely different perspective.

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. Query execution was so flaky that the actual timeout used when terminating the execution used to be something like 50ms lower than the provided value. This is obviously not a fantastic state of affairs.

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.

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