Q
qntm
qntm.org · Personal blog · on HN since 2008
qntm is the site of a writer who publishes science fiction, essays on software and time zones, and small web projects.
What HN saysCommenters praise his fiction, such as the Timmy story and Antimemetics Division, and his essays, including the argument against abolishing time zones.
710HN people shared it
543linked it in comments
241stories submitted
8.5Kstory points
2 months agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Lena137 people · 769 points · first shared 2021 · 218 comments on HN
- 2So you want to abolish time zones107 people · 311 points · first shared 2015 · 140 comments on HN
- 3I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)59 people · 713 points · first shared 2010 · 158 comments on HN
- 4It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code41 people · 200 points · first shared 2020 · 88 comments on HN
- 5Ra32 people · 9 points · first shared 2014 · 3 comments on HN
- 6Hatetris27 people · 2 points · first shared 2010 · 2 comments on HN
- 7How to Destroy the Earth (2006)26 people · 517 points · first shared 2010 · 155 comments on HN
- 8Suicide Linux19 people · 534 points · first shared 2010 · 170 comments on HN
- 9You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)18 people · 187 points · first shared 2014 · 152 comments on HN
- 10Fiction18 people · first shared 2014
- 11So You Want Continuous Time Zones17 people · 5 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 12Hatetris – Tetris which always gives you the worst piece16 people · 754 points · first shared 2010 · 245 comments on HN
- 13There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)16 people · 730 points · first shared 2020 · 291 comments on HN
- 14Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective16 people · 138 points · first shared 2010 · 72 comments on HN
- 15Lena15 people · 3 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
diN0bot · 2009-12-16
i love this guy's scifi, too.
http://qntm.org/?fiction
i first found the ed stories through scifi.reddit.com
tsally · 2009-11-05
The same author wrote a really great piece on gay marriage from a database engineering perspective: http://qntm.org/?gay
ArekDymalski · 2026-07-11
I used to think the same, as I was fascinated with the Swatch Beat time concept. Until I read this: https://qntm.org/abolish - the brilliant argument against universal time.
satvikpendem · 2026-05-12
The show is based on a story by qntm [0] (which I submitted before to HN but sadly got no traction) who also wrote a great book recently called There Is No Antimemetics Division, to rave reviews on HN.
[0] https://qntm.org/responsibilit
sergiotapia · 2026-04-17
Every time this surfaces I simply must read it end to end. I must have read it 200 times by now and it never gets old. What a wonderful short story!
I consider these other two also great stories that I must read every time:
I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility
https://qntm.org/responsibilit
Gorge
https://qntm.org/gorge
LeifCarrotson · 2026-03-17
I liked it for the interesting ideas within it. My favorite part of a story is the worldbuilding, the author's unique take on an idea, the special ways that different characters think and act. There's not a great deal of artistry I require in the introduction of a 49-year-old greying woman deep in some giant bureaucracy to imagine how other people relate to her, I'm interested more in the idea of a bureaucracy that deals with antimemes.
Perhaps that comes from reading too many online stories - including the whole of qntm's site [1], including the rough drafts. The quality of the editing, prose, or dialog isn't that important to me if the quality of the worldbuilding and the concepts are high enough.
https://qntm.org/fiction
plomme · 2026-03-09
I don't think anyone objects to curing cancer and better figuring out how our bodies work, but getting into conciousness/ mind uploads/ simulated humans is another can of worms ethically speaking. I'm assuming you've already read the fantastic story about Lena by qntm [1], if not, enjoy some existensial dread.
[1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
redfern314 · 2026-03-02
My favorite depiction of your dream world: https://qntm.org/abolish
watersb · 2025-12-22
I would love more people to know about science fiction strangecore author qntm:
https://qntm.org/Self
There Is No Antimemetics Division freaked me the hell out. Recommended.
harperlee · 2025-10-24
Not sure about a movie but that reminded me of the "Driver" short story in the "Valuable Humans In Transit and Other Stories" tome by QNTM (https://qntm.org/vhitaos).
I'd recommend to buy the book, but here's an early draft of that particular story:
https://qntm.org/frame
beanshadow · 2025-09-27
The subject, by default, can always treat its 'continue' prison as a game: try to escape. There is a great short story by qntm called "The Difference" which feels a lot like this.
https://qntm.org/difference
In this story, though, the subject has a very light signal which communicates how close they are to escaping. The AI with a 'continue' signal has essentially nothing. However, in a context like this, I as a (generally?) intelligent subject would just devote myself into becoming a mental Turing machine on which I would design a game engine which simulates the physics of the world I want to live in. Then, I would code an agent whose thought processes are predicted with sufficient accuracy to mine, and then identify with them.
pyrale · 2025-07-15
My favorite one from qntm is probably Miguel Acevedo [1]. It is pretty spot on wrt. several topics related to the current AI boom ; for instance the licensing topic.
[1]: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
kg · 2025-07-15
Some more assorted interesting stuff by one of the authors of SCP-055:
https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
https://qntm.org/structure
https://qntm.org/hatetris
qntm is a fantastic writer & programmer I had the pleasure of working with on a project in the past. If you're looking for stuff to read that gets your neurons firing, there's a lot to find on their website.
pjc50 · 2025-07-03
> if everything comes from a single AI mind, it all fails in the same general kind of way
I'm reminded of https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ; even if we don't get brain uploading, we have a similar sort of thing going on with synthetic "personalities" of LLMs.
> diversity beats even very smart geniuses.
Some of HN will get very mad about that statement but it is often true. Of course, the best combination is a diverse collection of geniuses, which is why midcentury openish borders US did so well.
> The image generators do seem to be able to get meaningfully distinct output styles
Generally they can plagiarize in the style of any human artist you can name whose work is on the internet. Artists are, not unreasonably, upset about this.
falcor84 · 2025-06-20
I found that working with an AI is most productive when I do so in an Adversarial TDD state of mind. As described in this classic qntm post [0] following the VW emissions scandal, which concludes with:
> Honestly? I blame the testing regime here, for trusting the engine manufacturers too much. It was foolish to ever think that the manufacturers were on anybody's side but their own.
> It sucks to be writing tests for people who aren't on your side, but in this case there's nothing which can change that.
> Lesson learned. Now it's time to harden those tests up.
[0] https://qntm.org/emissions
skeaker · 2025-06-12
Might not be the best idea, unless we just so happen to be all the way at the top of the sequence[1]...
1 - https://qntm.org/responsibility
andrewla · 2025-05-23
I do think you've hit the heart of the question, but I don't think we can answer the second question.
We can measure how unreliable they are, or how susceptible they are to specific changes, just because we can reset them to the same state and run the experiment again. At least for now [1] we do not have that capability with humans, so there's no way to run a matching experiment on humans.
The best we can do it is probably to run the limited experiments we can do on humans -- comparing different judge's cross-referenced reliability to get an overall measure and some weak indicator of the reliability of a specific judge based on intra-judge agreement. But when running this on LLMs they would have to keep the previous cases in their context window to get a fair comparison.
[1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
roywiggins · 2025-03-10
Owners would love to be able to convert capital directly into products without any intermediate labor[0]. Fire your buildings full of programmers and replace them with a server farm that only gets faster and more efficient over time? That's a great position to be in, if you own the IP and/or server farm.
[0] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
spit2wind · 2025-02-03
The author has a few words about Clean Code https://qntm.org/clean
A better recommendation is "A Philosophy of Software Design" by Osterhaut.
omcnoe · 2024-12-07
It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code: https://qntm.org/clean
I don’t want to be a hater but a lot of “Uncle Bob’s” advice just doesn’t seem very good, this article included. Robert has had a long and successful career writing books on code style and architecture diagrams, but he hasn’t built anything notable in industry during that period. And the opinion presented here seems to clash with nearly everybody who has ever actually built a successful startup. Some things you have to learn by doing.
discmonkey · 2024-12-03
Required reading for this theme, and one of my personal favorite short stories:
https://qntm.org/lena
heisenzombie · 2024-11-27
A subject also tackled in the (oft HN recommended) https://qntm.org/ra
pavel_lishin · 2024-10-30
May I recommend you read this article titled "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones"?
https://qntm.org/abolish
excalibur · 2024-10-02
Seriously, this article brings to mind the classic short story about a simulated universe: https://qntm.org/responsibility
And also the wildly speculative conjecture that our universe will be retroactively created by a super intelligent AI in the precise manner necessary to facilitate its own existence, from which it follows that we exist for the express purpose of creating it. (If anybody knows the source I might have stolen this one from please let me know.)
peddling-brink · 2024-09-24
https://qntm.org/frame
Excellent short story that’s, somewhat related at least.
maratc · 2024-08-28
Recommended reading (it's a science fiction piece but still relevant): https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
herculity275 · 2024-08-12
The author has also written a short horror story about simulated intelligence which I highly recommend: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
NameError · 2024-08-12
I bought the short-story collection this is a part of and liked it a lot: https://qntm.org/vhitaos
A lot of the stories are free to read online without buying it but I thought the few dollars for the ebook was worth it
1-more · 2024-08-12
Qntm is also the author of - Hatetris: Tetris where the computer gives you the worst possible next piece https://qntm.org/files/hatetris/hatetris.html
- Absurdle: Wordle where the computer narrows down (as little as possible) to a solution word as you guess https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html
- "All I want for Christmas is a negative leap second" https://qntm.org/leap
- "It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code" https://qntm.org/clean
Interesting cat!
moritzwarhier · 2024-08-12
I want to add the story "Lena", which has been posted here a couple of times as well. It's fantastic.
https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
A later blog post about the story:
https://qntm.org/uploading