I feel a bit silly pointing this out, but all that stuff about hexes and witches and everything mystical in the article is just a playful framing story. Aphyr in all likelihood is not an occultist or mystic, and is just writing playfully (and somewhat ironically) about technology and modern interviews. The playful conflation of mystical incantations and writing code is an old hacker tradition (other playful traditions: mixing buddhism and zen with coding, and writing apocryphal parables about it). Also, it should be noted that being an atheist doesn't preclude being interested in the history of religion, folklore literature and traditions, or even entirely fictional religions.

Of course, maybe your comment above was playful and ironic as well, in which case I missed the point :)

I always like to kindly remind people that sufficiently-advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

My favourite casting of this is 'any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced'.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented."

[I think I coined this one, back in the day. But I was probably preceded by someone even more damaged]

And then we come full circle back to heavy wizardry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(programming)#Variants

Remember that computing is a quick way to invoke CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.

Is this an HN novelty account in the making?

That wasn't my original intent, no. I already have a HN account with a few thousand karma. What I needed was to be able to comment without tying it to my main username.

An Italian I used to work with maintained a small shrine to Ada Lovelace on his desk.

Take your chintzy superstitions elsewhere, smug smug.