Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 662 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
2026
363

You don't have to

"In the year 5555, your arms are hangin' limp at your sides, your legs got nothing to do, some machine doin' that for you." Zager and Evans sang these words in 1969. Now, thirty-five centuries ahead of schedule, it's never been easier to tell the world "I didn't care about this and I don't care about you."

365

Take better notes, by hand

Researching a topic is hard, because not only are you trying to puzzle together the causes and effects of a given problem or historical series of events, you're also looking out carefully for leads and new threads to pull. Falling down rabbit holes is common—and encouraged—but eventually you need to pull yourself back…

389

Work with the garage door up (2024)

One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan (below). This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday ; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re…