HN: The Good Parts (2016)

if you’re one of those people, you’ve probably already thought of this, but maybe consider, at the margin, blogging more and commenting on HN less? As a result of writing this post, I looked through my old HN comments and noticed that I wrote this comment three years ago, which is another way of stating the second half of this post I wrote recently. Comparing the two, I think the HN comment is substantially better written. But, like most HN comments, it got some traffic while the story was still current and is now buried, and AFAICT, nothing really happened as a result of the comment. The blog post, despite being “worse”, has gotten some people to contact me personally, and I’ve had some good discussions about that and other topics as a result. Additionally, people occasionally contact me about older posts I’ve written; I continue to get interesting stuff in my inbox as a result of having written posts years ago. Writing your comment up as a blog post will almost certainly provide more value to you, and if it gets posted to HN, it will probably provide no less value to HN. Steve Yegge has a pretty list of reasons why you should blog that I won’t recapitulate here. And if you’re writing substantial comments on HN, you’re already doing basically everything you’d need to do to write a blog except that you’re putting the text into a little box on HN instead of into a static site generator or some hosted blogging service. BTW, I’m not just saying this for your benefit: my selfish reason for writing this appeal is that I really want to read the Nathan Kurz blog on low-level optimizations, the Jonathan Tang blog on what it’s like to work at startups vs. big companies, etc. [return] if you’re one of those people, you’ve probably already thought of this, but maybe consider, at the margin, blogging more and commenting on HN less? As a result of writing this post, I looked through my old HN comments and noticed that I wrote this comment three years ago, which is another way of stating the second half of this post I wrote recently. Comparing the two, I think the HN comment is substantially better written. But, like most HN comments, it got some traffic while the story was still current and is now buried, and AFAICT, nothing really happened as a result of the comment. The blog post, despite being “worse”, has gotten some people to contact me personally, and I’ve had some good discussions about that and other topics as a result. Additionally, people occasionally contact me about older posts I’ve written; I continue to get interesting stuff in my inbox as a result of having written posts years ago. Writing your comment up as a blog post will almost certainly provide more value to you, and if it gets posted to HN, it will probably provide no less value to HN. Steve Yegge has a pretty list of reasons why you should blog that I won’t recapitulate here. And if you’re writing substantial comments on HN, you’re already doing basically everything you’d need to do to write a blog except that you’re putting the text into a little box on HN instead of into a static site generator or some hosted blogging service. BTW, I’m not just saying this for your benefit: my selfish reason for writing this appeal is that I really want to read the Nathan Kurz blog on low-level optimizations, the Jonathan Tang blog on what it’s like to work at startups vs. big companies, etc.