surprisetalk

Example: You've been wanting to take cooking classes, but you've also been wanting to join an improv group. If you don't have time/resources for both of these projects, you might choose a "metaproject" like "weekly dinner party with funny friends" -- it doesn't strictly meet the requirements from either project, but might achieve something deeper you're looking for.

Ouch! Honestly, I'm probably all those things (and worse). But I found the concept of "metaprojects" helpful for shrinking the footprint of my ambitions. Instead of wanting everything, now I'm happier pursuing fewer things :-) At some point, I'll hopefully learn to let go even more. I hope other folks can learn/resonate from my particular brand of crazy

Hi friends!

I just added a bunch of new blogs after this huge thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618714

Enjoy :)

beware

Author of https://blogs.hn here :) I will crawl these comments and add them soon!

This reflects my experience with human programmers. So many devs are taught to add layers of complexity in pursuit of "best practices". I think the LLM was trained to behave this way.

In my experience, Claude can actually clean up a repo rather nicely if you ask it to (1) shrink source code size (LOC or total bytes), (2) reduce dependencies, and (3) maintain integration tests.

It helps me think of this problem in terms of "crowpower".

[1] https://taylor.town/crowpower

They assassinated him because he uncovered too much forbidden knowledge about the triangles

Reminds me of one of my favorite horror stories (NSFW):

https://imgur.com/gallery/lni-enigma-of-amigara-fault-junji-...

No clue why this is on HN, but Bjork is brilliant. IMO one of the greatest living musical artists. If you haven’t listened to one of her records, I recommend starting with Homogenic

EDIT: For deeper dives, note that each album is generally thematic. Vespertine is about physical intimacy, Volta experiments with percussion, Medulla is 100% human vocals, etc. Wikipedia is your friend here :)

LISTEN/NOTIFY works great but they don’t have any mechanism for ACKs or retries so it’s got some tradeoffs to consider. Works great when you’re willing to sacrifice some durability!

Author here! Posting from phone while traveling so sorry for bad formatting.

It was outside of the scope of this essay, but a lot of these problems can be resolved with a mid-transaction COMMIT and reasonable timeouts

You can implement a lean idempotency system within the task pattern like this, but it really depends on what you need and what failures you want to prevent

Thanks for providing more context and safety tips! :)

Author here! Thanks for all the feedback on my LLM tangent, quoted here for posterity:

  Luckily, LLMs significantly reduce the effort/cost of therapy experiments. Consider trying the following prompt:

  > Please guide me through a round of ERP therapy. Start by listing universal sources of fear/discomfort/anxiety.

  If you find this process useful, consider trying it with a licensed human professional.

After some consideration, I agree that this advice could backfire for some people. I removed it from the essay.

Do you know of any low-friction ways to systematically tackle fears/discomforts? I really want to recommend a quick experiment that folks can try at home without doing full-blown therapy.

Thanks!

I normally don't publish sappy essays like this, but I wanted to try sharing a common experience of rejection with a loud call for optimism and self-growth. I'm still learning how to be an authentic/vulnerable person, and I may have missed the mark

I like myself now. I really do. But sometimes that old self-doubt comes roaring back and I have to beat it down with a stick. You're totally right -- internet strangers cannot beat those feelings down for me.

By the time I published this, I was already back in a great headspace and moving on to the next thing :)

My hope is that somebody reads the essay and grows 1% more motivated to grab a stick and beat down their own self-doubts. I'll be sure to put that front-and-center in future essays

Author here! I should say that I can't turn my weird off quickly and consistently :) The feedback loops in social situations are slow. I've been working really hard on my listening/people skills, but these things take time, and I'm probably just being too impatient

Author here! Just want to be extra crystal clear that Anthropic gave me a boring/standard coding project. I decided to post a parallel project to HN to demonstrate that I was able to quickly create engaging software. They in no way asked or insinuated that I share anything online

Author here! Thanks for this. This is exactly what I want people to feel :) I'm willing to hurt my chances if it helps others

Amen! If you're looking to fill out your RSS reader, I maintain a directory of tech blogs (ctrl+f "feed" for rss links):

[0] https://blogs.hn

Other good directories:

[1] https://ooh.directory/

[2] https://blogroll.org/

git log is probably good enough for 90% of folks :)

The main reason I wanted to build this is that git log doesn't give me context from GitHub PRs/issues/milestones or CI events. When I'm diving into a new codebase, I like to see who's been working on what, and what ongoing problems/initiatives are propelling that development.

I've only got GH issues up (not milestones or CI events yet), but I think this is a good start!

Reminds me of a quote from Gerald J Sussman. He joked that he could give a 4-hour lecture about anything, but only 50-minutes if he knew the subject well.

Thanks for the tips :)

I'm not really trying to promote that hard right now. I moreso thought that HN might enjoy my unorthodox pricing structure and table of estimates.

You might enjoy this:

[0] https://taylor.town/is-betteridges-law

No worries :)

I'm currently ~150 weeks into 1000 Weeks Without Drinking! Highly recommended.

[0] https://taylor.town/1000-weekends

via https://www.bookofjoe.com/2025/06/my-entry-15-1.html

My father deliberately didn't invest in my education because "Jesus is coming back in the next few years anyway".

I was raised SDA; this mindset goes back hundreds of years. Leading up to the 1844, "Great Disappointment", people stopped learning, stopped growing, stopped saving, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment

Even if AGI is inevitable, its timeline and effects on your life are unknown.

You are alive. You are alive. You are alive.