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Comment by EdwardDiego | Hacker News Reader

Author in 2015:

> If every time you write a blog post it takes you six months, and you're sitting around your apartment on a Sunday afternoon thinking of stuff to do, you're probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because it'll feel too expensive.

Author in 2025:

> This is why it’s so useful to work on an article for a long time. If you’re reporting on something for six months, even if the really concentrated part, the key visit, is only a week or two of that, you have time for notes to accumulate.

What a difference 10 years of experience makes eh?

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I took this to mean, in the first case "I write an article every six months" and in the second "I work on each article for six months, but I work on multiple in parallel so I post them very frequently".

The first is being blocked/out of inspiration, the second is being meticulous.

Interesting. I seem historically to have mostly had the opposite problem: too much inspiration, too many ideas, no willingness to choose. It seems, then, like the solution is to kick-start myself into just trying to do multiple things in parallel. But whenever I start on something it seems like I either struggle and freeze (I feel "blocked" despite that I should very well know what the next step is), or I hyper-focus.

Someone had the bright idea to post another point of view at the same time, so they're both on the front page right now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311092

I take this to mean: look at how others do it, find what works for you and then do that.

yeah, so many things have not worked for me. after 30 years apparently it's dexamphetamine and a location away from my house i only use for work or nothing

The second article is here: https://jsomers.net/blog/the-mcphee-method

But then the "blog post" in the old example and the "article" in the new one belong to a different type of artifact, right? It's a bit like the distinction between "programming in the small" and "programming in the large". While belonging to the same medium and often done by the same people, they prioritize very different aspects.

What's the difference between a blog post and an article these days? Some of my favourite reporting is a "blog post".

I'm not looking to draw a general distinction between the terms, but rather just saying that there's a qualitative difference between a thing you write and publish in a single afternoon (or even a single lunch break), and something you research and prepare over 6 months. Many people routinely do both and are good at both; neither is inherently better, but they are different things.

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