[HN Gopher] Mario and Earendil
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Mario and Earendil
Author : doppp
Score : 64 points
Date : 2026-04-08 09:13 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lucumr.pocoo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lucumr.pocoo.org)
| aikinai wrote:
| Oh... not what I expected this to be about.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| I unironically thought that it was going to be an essay on
| naming characters in fiction. Like simplicity vs. self-imposed
| complexity.
|
| Ah, anyway, what's clear enough is that Earendil is a
| tragically bad name for a company.
| cm2012 wrote:
| I thought it was going to be an essay on the hero archetype
| from Earendil to Mario lol.
| gweinberg wrote:
| I thought it would be a team-up between two. Presumably the
| elf would help fight turtles and donkey kong, since what good
| is a plumber in a world without plumbing?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| From browsing the Earendil website, I'm honestly not sure if this
| is a software startup or a cult...
| jfengel wrote:
| There seems to be a pattern associated with grabbing names from
| Tolkien.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| Palantir, Anduril...
|
| The Dark Lord minions are really busy lately.
| cushychicken wrote:
| Don't forget Sauron.
|
| https://www.sauron.systems/
| lordleft wrote:
| There's a dark irony in start-ups appropriating names from
| the work of a devout catholic attached to beautiful, old
| modes of life.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| So, is Earendil, just Pi?
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| They also have an AI mailbox service called Lefos.
| jfengel wrote:
| I was really hoping for some kind of Nintendo/Silmarillion
| crossover.
|
| This is good too, I guess.
| bombcar wrote:
| Perhaps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvo6AZnHV4 or
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BgpBZB3Apno will satisfy.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Same news here with 76 comments:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687533
| moffers wrote:
| Gotta admit, I'm a sucker for a well-dressed mysterious preview.
| Really excited to see what Lefos is all about.
| dgb23 wrote:
| The first one I remember was the old whatisthematrix.com. Seems
| to be updated now unfortunately.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > Trademarks: our main mechanism of protection is trademark
| enforcement. When you see pi, it's a product of Earendil, with
| Mario, the creator of Pi, at the helm.
|
| Interesting, considering I doubt I will ever see Pi in the
| context of computing and not immediately think of Raspberry Pi
| first.
|
| I realize that legally speaking they can hold a distinct
| trademark for software when the other Pi is hardware but it just
| seems odd to me to lean so heavily on the trademarking of a
| commonly overloaded two letter name.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| This was terrible branding, and is terrible branding.
|
| The clash between "Earendil" and "Pi" is so overdetermined it
| might have required earnest effort.
| ahhhhnoooo wrote:
| I see a Tolkien name on a tech company, I assume the founders
| deeply misunderstood Tolkien and probably are pretty gross. I
| haven't been wrong yet.
| teddyh wrote:
| Good thing my project is not a company, then:
| <https://www.recompile.se/mandos>
| incanus77 wrote:
| > First things first: I think you should read Mario's post.
|
| And from that:
|
| > Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech
| company with fascist tendencies. Quite the opposite. They are
| basically well-meaning hippies in my book, who think software,
| and specifically AI, should serve humans, not the other way
| around.
|
| So, somewhat hopeful? I'm not sure I can take any more of this
| grossness.
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| I know nothing about Earendil and this is not meant to take
| away from them, but half of Alexander Karp's (Palantir CEO)
| book was "We are basically well-meaning hippies in my book,
| who think software, and specifically AI, should serve humans,
| not the other way around."
| popalchemist wrote:
| Right. And now he brags about being part of an automated
| kill chain and being proud that he kills his enemies.
|
| Words carry no weight in a world where every person in
| power weaponizes lying.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Fair.
| egonschiele wrote:
| Armin is pretty well-known in the tech space. He has
| contributed a ton to open source and generally seems like a
| fairly principled person. I think this may be the first case
| where you turn out to be wrong :)
| ahhhhnoooo wrote:
| Here's hoping!
| popalchemist wrote:
| The right wing completely misunderstands Tolkien and/or is
| deliberately co-opting it in an attempt to gaslight the world
| about their nature/motives.
| tietjens wrote:
| Why should we cede Tolkien to those villians?
| meowface wrote:
| He's not, he made Flask/Click/Jinja/lots of other open source
| projects.
|
| (That said, he possibly is the first person to break this
| pattern, yes...)
|
| https://x.com/mitsuhiko/status/2041855748481695774
| bitwize wrote:
| I thought this was going to be a comparison between the
| archetypal features of the Tolkien Legendarium and that of
| Nintendo games' lore, but no.
| peterldowns wrote:
| My very first real tech job in the bay, my new boss recommended I
| study up on Armin's open source code in order to get better as an
| engineer. It's been very interesting following his work over the
| years. I'm extremely curious to see how Earendil goes -- no
| surprise if it's a success.
|
| Congratulations Armin, and Mario, and good luck.
|
| Dug up the email, here's what my boss said directly:
|
| _In terms of tech to keep up on, it might be worth while to play
| around with node.js a bit as we 've been doing a few small
| projects using the Express MVC framework. A great reference for
| js, (which I remember chatting with you briefly about) is
| Javascript the Good Parts (Douglas Crockford). You may also
| consider seeking enlightenment on Armin Ronacher's github page
| (he's a python master, leader of flask, genshi, pocoo, long time
| python contributor) https://github.com/mitsuhiko. His code is
| pretty top notch. I follow Kenneth Reitz quite a bit too (Armin
| and he often work on projects together). Kenneth is know for
| le*git and python's request library._
| tolerance wrote:
| Someone convince me that "machine entity" is not an odd phrase.
| dude250711 wrote:
| Who even are these people? I thought it was going to be about
| Nintendo...
| egonschiele wrote:
| Armin - creator of Flask
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Ronacher
|
| Mario - creator of Pi https://pi.dev
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Mario Zechner aka badlogic - (co?)creator of libGDX (for us
| old farts who were around in the early Android days):
| https://libgdx.com/
|
| Later also heavily involved with Spine, which IME is still
| the defacto industry standard for 2D skinned animation in
| mobile/web games: https://esotericsoftware.com/
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Ah, that guy! I think I've seen him give a talk about Spine
| at Game Dev Days Graz a couple of years ago.
| vingilot wrote:
| Good luck Mario! Just don't tarry there in errantry
| niemandhier wrote:
| I was hoping for a piece on how Tolkien and Nintendo secretly
| interacted.
| projektfu wrote:
| That would have been the love hotel/pachinko era, no?
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(page generated 2026-04-08 23:02 UTC)