I'm just having fun
jyn.dev450 points by lemper 6 days ago
450 points by lemper 6 days ago
We need more people in this world willing to do their own thing, even if others might find it intimidating or silly. The important thing is to have fun and learn things. Compiler hacking is just as good as any other hobby, even if it's done in good jest.
Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money for.
Example: Cards Against Humanity started as a bit of a gag game between a small group of friends and eventually became something that has pop culture relevance.
Example: The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade. I like to think that he did this out of spite, and that Christmas letters to his old professor must've been fun.
You can't have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm.
How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal).
Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive".
Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for this). But there aren't leaps and bounds. Critically it keeps pushing things forward, refining and improving.
But then there's those in the long tail. They fail most of the time and are the "least productive". Sometimes never doing anything of note their entire lives. But these are also the people that change the world in much bigger ways. And sometimes those that appeared to do nothing have their value found decades or centuries later.
Not everyone needs to be Newton/Leibniz. Not everyone should be. But that kind of work is critical to advancing our knowledge and wealth as a species. The problem is it is often indistinguishable from wasting time. But I'm willing to bet that the work of Newton alone has created more value to all of human civilization than every failed long tail person has cost us.
In any investment strategy you benefit from having high risk investments. Most lose you money but the ones that win reward you with much more than you lost. I'm not sure why this is so well known in the investment world but controversial in the research/academic/innovation world.
You would likely enjoy Isaac Asimov's "Profession": https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php
Absolutely love that book and have even mentioned it on here before too lol.
I highly recommend it. I'm also just a huge Asimov fan
Hah. I think of it as a slime mold. There's the main body (bodies?), but it's always shooting out little bits of itself that try weird stuff - founding underwater communes, or climbing mountains in Crocs or something. Most of these offshoots don't have that much of an impact, but occasionally one lucks out and discovers America or peanut butter and the main body saunters off that way.
Yeah we find this type of optimization all over nature. Even radiation is important to create noise. We need it in machine learning. A noisy optimizer is critical for generalized learning. Too much noise and you learn nothing but no noise and you only memorize. So there's a balance
I'm reminded a bit of a robotics professor I had at uni, a very long time ago in the 1990s. When he was at uni in the late 70s he and a couple of friends were working on a robot arm, which didn't work because it kept dropping stuff. They made a more precise linkage for the gripper, and if anything it was worse. They made ever more precise bushings for the pivots, and it just didn't help or made it worse.
Eventually after a conversation in the pub with one of his friends who was studying sports physiotherapy, they ripped out the 47th set of really precise little Teflon bushings and put in new ones made of medical silicone rubber tubing.
Now all the joints were a bit sticky and squashy and wobbly, and it picked everything up perfectly every time.
I get the "outliers are useful" thing you're trying to emphasis. But as someone from a mountainous country, please dont "climb[ing] mountains in Crocs", we regularily get media reports of hopelessly underequipped people having to be rescued with a whole team of people, in the middle of the night, with horrible weather, usually also endangering the people that do the rescue. I guess what I am trying to say is, there is a limit to how silly you can/should be.
I don't understand how this is a power law and not normal. The "long tail" is usually mentioned in a normal distribution being the right-most end of it.
I think you have a misunderstanding because a heavy tail is essentially one that is not exponentially bounded. A long tail being a subclass.
There's kinda a big difference in the characteristics of a normal distribution and power and I think explaining that will really help.
In a normal you have pressure from both ends so that's why you find it in things like height. There's evolutionary pressure to not be too small but also pressure to not be too large. Being tall is advantageous but costly. Technically the distribution never ends (and that's in either direction!). Though you're not going to see micro people nor 100' tall people because the physics gets in the way. Also mind you that normal can't be less than zero.
It is weird to talk about "long tail" with normal distributions and flags should go up when hearing this.
In a power distribution you don't have bounding pressure. So they are scale free. A classic example of this is wealth. It's easier to understand if you ignore the negative case at first, so let's do that (it still works with negative wealth). There's no upper bound to wealth, right? So while most people will be in the main "mode" there is a long tail. We might also say something like "heavy tail" when the variance is even moderate. So this tail is both long and the median value isn't really representative of the distribution. Funny enough, power laws are incredibly common in nature. I'm really not sure why they aren't discussed more.
I think Veritasium did a video on power distributions recently? Might be worth a check.
Heavy tail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy-tailed_distribution
Long tail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
Glad you mentioned the veritasium video on these. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k
Before I watched this I would default to thinking about most distributions as normal. It's really fun to think about whatever "game" you are playing - wether you are building a business or trying to win a carnival game - and consider if the results follow a normal distribution or a power law?
What is the expected value, of some dude at university spinning dinner plates in the cafeteria? What a silly pointless thing to do! Of course, if you're physics Professor Feynman, you get a Nobel out of it, so do the silly pointless things after all!
If the bongo man taught me anything it's that you should do something for the pursuit itself. The utility can always be found later. But chasing utility first only limits your imagination
> The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade.
Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?
Allegedly, it was given a lower grade due to it not being a feasible business plan, in the professor's estimation. Of course, this forms part of the legend behind Fred Smith and FedEx, so that should be taken with a grain of salt.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fred-smith-told-yale-professo...
Hard to have hobbies when you're spending your time doordashing and struggling to pay rent.
Josef Pieper wrote a book called "Leisure: the Basis of Culture"[0] - published in 1948 - in which he discusses the meaning of leisure, which is not what we mean by it today, and criticizes the "bourgeois world of total labor" as a spiritually, intellectually, and culturally destructive force.
Today, we think of "leisure" as merely free time from work or recreation, something largely done to "recharge" so that we can go back to work (in other words: modern "leisure" is for the sake of work). This is not the original meaning. Indeed, etymologically, the word "school" comes from σχολή ("skholē"), which means "leisure", but with the understanding that it involves something like learned discussion or whatever. (Difficult to imagine, given how hostile modern schooling is, resembling more of a factory than a place of learning.) The purpose of work was to enable leisure. We labored in order to have leisure.
What's also interesting is that unlike us, who think of "leisure" in terms of work (that is, we think of it as a negation of work, "not-working"), the Greeks viewed it in exactly the opposite way. The word for "work" is ἀσχολίᾱ ("askholíā"), which is the absence of leisure. The understanding held for most of history and explains why we call the liberal arts liberal: it freed a man to be able to pursue truth effectively, and was contrasted with the servile arts, that is, everything with a practical aim like a trade or a craft.
This difference demonstrates an important shift and betrays the vulgar or nihilistic underbelly of our modern culture. Work is never for its own sake. It is always aimed at something other than itself (praxis and associated poiesis). This distinguishes it from something like theory (theoria) which is concerned with truth for its own sake.
So what do we work for? Work for its own sake is nihilistic, a kind of passing of the metaphysical buck, an activity pursued to avoid facing the question of what we live for. Work pursued merely to pay for sustenance - full stop - is vulgar and lacks meaning. Sustenance is important, but is that all you are, a beast that slurps food from a trough? Even here, only in human beings is food elevated into feast, into meal, a celebration and a social practice that incorporates food; it is not merely nutritive. Are you merely a consumerist who works to buy more crap, foolishly believing that ultimate joy will be found in the pointless chase for them?
Ask yourself: whom or what do you serve? Everyone aims at something. What are the choices of your life aiming at?
This captures something crucial that gets lost in the "validate your SaaS idea in 48 hours" culture. The best products often emerge from deep exploration of a problem space without immediate commercial pressure. When you're optimizing for fun and learning, you make different architectural choices - you experiment with weird ideas that might unlock novel solutions.
I see this in the analytics space constantly. Everyone rushes to clone Plausible/Fathom with minor tweaks because that's the "validated" approach. But the genuinely interesting problems - like real-time 3D geospatial visualization or AI-driven anomaly detection across behavioral patterns - require months of tinkering with WebGL, spatial databases, and ML pipelines before you know if it's viable.
The counter-argument is that "fun" can turn into perfectionism and never shipping. I think the balance is: have fun building the core innovative piece, but be ruthlessly pragmatic about everything else. For Prysm, I had fun building the real-time Globe visualization with Three.js and Supabase Realtime, but used boring proven tools (Next.js, Stripe, Resend) for auth/payments/email. Ship the fun part, commoditize the rest. That's how you avoid the "two years building in stealth" trap while still doing creative work.
When did this writing with no capitalization start to become a thing? I'm seeing it too often now. It's pretentious crap and quickly leads to me thinking that the writer doesn't want to be taken seriously, so why read it?
It's like xml vs html, some people really like their markup to have explicit closing/self-closed tags, others don't really care and expect the user-agent (the reader) to parse them correctly. Same with semicolons in Javascript.
A lot of the comments here are bashing you, but I just wanted to say that I feel the same. I find it jarring and off putting.
I started typing in no caps in most conversation around 2013-2016, when I first started playing League of Legends and using Discord. Other people from this same age bracket as me have similar experiences (if they were "chronically" online) and similar behavior patterns. It's not pretentious imo.
same.
also, it has it's own voice. a little less serious.
I can correctly capitalize if I wish, but I like I like the less formal take on text.
Interesting, I think for the older generation me included at the age of 45, it can be jarring to miss the visual marker of the capital letter in the beginning of a sentence. I have been online for 30 years and have certainly written my fair share of poor grammar, missing punctuation and probably missing capitalisation as well. I think the surprise comes from this being an article on the internet and seems like a design choice.
To me, writing in full, formally correct sentences, being careful to always use correct punctuation, starts to feel a little pretentious or tryhard in some contexts.
It doesn't feel too much like that here on HN. But on reddit, I use less formal structure most of the time, and that feels natural to me.
15 years ago, it was incredibly common to see folks texting things like "c u ltr". It made its way into instant messaging (where folks had a keyboard), but slowly disappeared once everyone had smartphones that autocorrected everything. I don't think it's strange to see that people prefer it stylistically. Text has very little in the way of showing emotions or intentions, so everything you can do to alter that is something to be used. People want to be less formal sometimes.
I usually speed read and the shape of the words helps. Having no capitalization feels like reading a very long sentence and slow down my speed a lot.
In the 1990s, this was called "whispering" and had pockets in BBS/CompuServe/AOL/usenet discussions. Also why I still think of all caps as shouting and can't be convinced otherwise (looking at Microsoft and a few other companies and their designers that keep going through phases insisting all caps is a useful flavor in UI design and not shouting for attention that they don't need).
I read the whole thing without seeing it. But I also fail to see how you marry "pretentious" with not wanting to be taken seriously. So maybe it's me.
If you purposely go into your phone settings and turn off auto-capitalization (which is what the kids do, since they're all typing on their phones), isn't it the very definition of pretentiousness? You're going into extra trouble to signify you're part of a clique, while feigning "laid-backness" and "i dont even care bro".
But you do care. You care so much to project your appearance of being cool and that you don't even care that you go through extra trouble to keep it up, even though paradoxically it would be LESS effort to not do it.
I think you are reading to much into kids trying to break norms and trying to be "part of a clique". It's not pretentiosness, it's part of finding yourself. They are also actively trying to get you to not read them because you are old and think they "are not serious" so mission accomplished I guess. And time will tell if these kids will invent something you have to respect. (Spoiler alert, we did and they will to)
I turn off autocapitalization on my phone so I can be consistent with my computers where it IS more effort to use capitalization. I also believe quite dogmatically that computers should not try to be smarter than me, I can press the buttons I intend to press, including the shift key on a phone keyboard.
This is not because I’m super cool, it’s because I’m an old man and I’m still typing in 2025 like I was typing on IRC in 1998 when nocapsing was absolutely dominant.
But if I type in a space where proper capitalization is expected, like HN, I do it (this was typed on my phone with no autocorrect, suggestions or autocapitalization — I know, I’m dumb and my opinions and settings are wrong). If it was my personal blog however I would do whatever I felt like doing.
Of course you are free to do what you want on your blog, but some choices make it harder to read. IMO not capitalising is similar to using hard to read fonts or colours.
You're describing a 15 second effort that is performed at most once per phone purchase, and at its least once in the owner's entire history of iOS backup/restore processes. Less total effort than our comments took to write. You're then reading a whole lot into that.
you're right, blog articles should be entirely devoid of stylistic choices and signifiers.
This probably has to do with what kind of Internet milieu you grew up in because to me — grown up on IRC and certain late 90s/early 00s web forums — lowercase everything signals a sort of chill, easygoing humility while properly capsing in a casual setting like chat can feel overbearing, pretentious and self-important.
> as is inconsistent in language usage to write differently than to speak. we don’t speak big sounds, that’s why we don't write them either.
Of all fatuous nonsenses I've heard from design "geniuses" over the years, that might take the prize.
We don't look at spoken words, we listen to them. We add audible prosody (both pauses and intonation changes, in particular) to segment our speech. If we were to optimise our spoken language for lip-readers, we might very well choose to add some extra visible segmentation to compensate for the intonation being mostly undetectable.
You could validly claim that capital letters are superfluous given the presence of full stops (and I would disagree and we could debate that), but this argument that capital letters are bad because we don't speak "big sounds" is absurd.
> it is inconsistent in language usage to write differently than to speak. we don’t speak big sounds, that’s why we don't write them either
We don't speak big sounds? We also don't speak commas and full stops, but those are still an important part of writing. Trying to get some of the suprasegmental features of speech into low bandwidth text.
Yes, let us write without spaces or punctuation, that is what we used to do always!
It probably starts with the habit of writing words without using the Shift key or diacritics. Just to be quick. At least, that’s how I’ve noticed this behavior in myself.
I've seen - and used - such nocaps patterns as far back as the 90's on IRC.
As I remember there was no singular reason; not having to pinky-press shift was definitely a factor.
It is something people born 2000 and later do to try to sound cool and detached. It's really no more complicated than that.
My spider sense tells me it has to do with lesbian anarchism, as explained in Douglas Coupland's jPod.
Most people usually see common scammers writing emails with no capitalization to scam their victims, especially if it is not their first language.
More importantly, tech literate folks in here are tuned to ignore such writing styles as they can figure out writing styles that are from scammers, LLMs and impersonators from dodgy domains.
So, you’re right to question this and I find this trend immature and I assume anyone using it to be in the realm of satire and of unserious character.
Capitalization aids the eye in its search for sentence breaks; it makes reading easier.
relax
No
Nothing compares 2 U
Prince song from the 1980s
Prince was pretentious AF
And I will be eternally thankful for his contribution to human culture
bruh, we're never making it to space as a society if you can't stop getting hung up on pointless shit like this
who friggen cares? why can the president diddle kids, but a random internet user has to have perfect grammar to be taken seriously?
the poster of this article could probably not care less if you "take them seriously"
i actually interact with ideas, not grammar. Especially in a fun personal blog post like this
I think Sam Altman popularized it with his tweets during the height of OpenAI, GPT popularity ~2023. Or maybe it was already trending by then but at least for me he was the first among prominent people to be doing it.
Smartphones forced automated capitalization on us, just look at how chatlogs have changed over time. I'd suggest no-capitalization is on the downtrend, but sticks out more because everything is automatically capitalized now.
the lack of capitalization (and occasional omission of punctuation) was already a big thing on tumblr / twitter 10 years ago, especially in some anime and LGBT-adjacent spaces. I don't think jyn got it from Sam Altman, and I don't think he had that big a role in popularizing it.
It was a thing 25 years ago already in SMS and IM.
Before smartphones, it seems to have been the standard for just about every form of instant messaging. Well, morse has no capitalization and telex would typically have been uppercase-only too, but I think we can still count those?
I suspect that this is just something that happens naturally, for shorter-format messaging typing in sentence case probably offers no added readability and tends to get dropped over time.
imho it was definitely popular before and altman adopted it to fit in with the online crowd
sama writing like that is not a new thing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000015
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59004
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15 (from literally the first HN thread ever)
Also, it's perhaps somewhat hilarious to suggest that someone who has been chronically online for decades has to do anything to "fit in"
He writes as people who grew up on IRC and similar platforms tend to.
oh okay, I shouldn't have judged that so haphazardly. thx for the references
I joined a compiler team out of college because it seemed like fun and I'd never worked on compilers before.
I went from C# to embedded engineering and reading clock and wiring diagrams because there was a job that needed doing and I was the one there at the time.
I went from embedded programming to running my own startup based on Javascript and React (technologies I'd never used) because I had an idea I wanted to share with the world.
Just go out and try to do things, you may be surprised with what you are capable of!
Yes, but that often breaks down once you have bills to pay and need steady income. Real life tends to complicate things. The risk-averse path is a valid choice too, and often the only sensible one.
Plenty of people take risks even with obligations. I am risk averse, and like to ascribe much of that to my obligations to keep my family happy, but really I've always been this way, and would act pretty much the same without them. On the other hand, I've seen folks go to the brink of poverty to start businesses even with small children to feed. They are far more successful today than myself.
There's a video I once saw of Jim Carrey talking about his dad, who, if I recall correctly, was originally a jazz musician, but decided it was too risky and opted to become an accountant instead.
And then, having given up on his dreams to follow the risk-averse path, he got fired.
Jim's words on the subject were like "well, he gave up on his dreams and still failed, so that's why I decided to pursue acting".
I'm asking this question purely out of curiosity, and not as a snark, is there any particular reason why you don't capitalise the beginnings of your sentences? It seems strange to go to the effort of capitalising STEM and putting a hyphen in college-level without capitalising the letters. Is it something like the push towards sans-serif fonts because some groups of people find it easier to read?
My dev friends used to do this as a sort of inside joke around the office. If you were cool and hip, you wrote emails like this as a way to sort of thumb your nose at the establishment.
I did it for a while until I was considered a "senior" dev and one of the VP's pulled me aside and said it reflects poorly on me when I'm not using proper grammar. He said as a senior dev in the org, I should hold myself to a higher standard. At which time, I started using proper grammar.
Always puts a smile on my face when I see this is still a thing in certain circles. Nonconformity isn't quite dead - and that's a good thing.
Great handle, but also isn’t that the point where it matters if you keep at it?
Everywhere I’ve worked, there’s a funny phenomenon where the people just under the real decision makers use formal language, start emails with salutations and sign them, etc. Whereas the actual decision makers send emails like “can u look in2 this? thx”
I wish non-conformity was more of a thing at points where it actually matters. Your product manager asks you to add invasive user tracking and surveillance? Push back and explain how this makes the world a worse place. Got a ticket to implement a "[yes][ask me later]" dialog [1]? Make a short survey that shows how user hate it. Nobody listens to you? Refuse to comply. The government requires you to take deeply unethical or unlawful actions? Sabotage the feature [2] (or quit/resign).
Performative non-conformance might be e.g. helpful to nurture a culture of critical thinking, but if it is just performative, then it is worthless.
(I write this with no intent to criticize you, burningChrome, or Jyn. You might very well do just that.)
(Also, I'm aware that the ability to push back is very unevenly distributed. I'm addressing those that can afford this agency. And also, non-conformance is spectrum: You can also push back a little without choosing the specific point to be the hill to die on. Every bit counts.)
[1] https://idiallo.com/blog/hostile-not-enshittification
[2] https://www.404media.co/heres-a-pdf-version-of-the-cia-guide...
Yeah, agreed. Otherwise it's a kind of low stakes "non-conformity", even a conformity of sorts (because everything lowercase is/was actually an internet fad, so it's a kind of "extremely online" conformity).
Non-conformity where it matters would be a lot better, but it's also scarier.
For me it made the text way more difficult to read. Periods and commas can be sometimes difficult to differentiate for people with poor sight or just on small screens, so having a capital letter next to the dot character is a very relevant visual cue to confirm it was indeed a period and not a comma.
Gen Z linguistic phenomenon. It's to signify a more authentic or calmer, more personable style rather than an overly literary one. It's kind of nice actually, like talking to a friend about their thoughts.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
It's how we all used to talk on IRC, well before Gen Z came online :)
Yes however I doubt the author was an IRC user. For chats people generay do use lowercase cause it's easier but this article is also about using lowercase outside of chats.
This user I think got it from Tumblr (firmly millennial).
Gen Z I would think default to title case because that’s what smart phones produce when not wrangled.
That depended on your IRC server of choice.
I grew up on some where you got flamed very quickly if you didn’t clean that up (e.g Espernet).
It goes back to the 1960s TV show, "The Prisoner".[1] In the village, all signage and maps are lower case only, and in a unique font.
bauhaus in 1925 has been linked in a peer comment.
i've got a 1926 print book is 5 by e e cummings who famously often used lowercase in his prose and poems ... going back earlier than the collection i have.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_5
* my sweet old etcetera - https://web.archive.org/web/19991008163420/http://www.geocit...
still, as you're a fan of that 1960's show ... here's a few samples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dm_iq5OicM (1985)
IME it is a common affectation in the queer / feminist internet. A sort of Tumblr Shibboleth.
I guess, these days, also a "not typing this on a phone" Shibboleth.
i do the same, at first naturally because this is how all the cool kids talked on the places of the internet i frequented when i came of age ca. 2000-2005
now i do it because i am considered a seniorish person, and i need to deal with many coworkers that have gone beyond fear of picking up a phone and are now seemingly afraid to even type messages and i want to show them that it's okay to bring a little bit of yourself to your communication
- X is typing indicators turning on/off/on/off for 5 minutes
- X finally sends an obviously llm inspired 5 paragraph argument that on the face of it looks well structured but has all the mental nutrients of a bag of cheetos
- the message is stuffed with at least six emoji to somehow preemptively control the emotional state of the recipient
all to say "please take a look cuz i think you forgot to add unit tests for y?" and i have neither the stamina to engage with nor the desire to conform to this milquetoast inauthentic fluffy overly uptight way of communicating
But in your comment history, you literally don't write like this.
I didn't think twice about it in the article. But I don't read all lowercase as "friendly." It reads curt. Like you didn't have time. Which makes me not want to ask you for help. It's what my boss does when he has 12 seconds to help people, and it discourages people from messaging him.
It also makes it hard to read where a sentence ends.
I'm a little surprised to see so many people not just say this is a better way to write, but that merely capitalizing your sentences is the corpo propaganda way of writing.
You could say "Please take a look as I think you may have forgotten to add unit tests for Y?"
Easy fix :)
function f(n){n.childNodes.forEach(c=>{c.nodeType===3?c.textContent=c.textContent.replace(/(^|[.!?]\s+)([a-z])/g,(m,s,l)=>s+l.toUpperCase()):c.nodeType===1&&f(c)})}f(document.body)I use "text-transform: lowercase;". It's just a fun look. When I get tired of it I'll just remove the property.
Thank you, I just did the opposite in Microsoft teams PWA, "text-transform: uppercase;", now I feel like the whole company is mad, everyone using shouty caps at each other, and every message makes me laugh!
I have apparently been in a bubble based on the other commenter saying this was a gen z phenomenon.
Back in the 1337sp43k days in my internet circles, typing in all lowercase other than acronyms was the opposite of TYPING IN ALL CAPS. We used it to infer a whisper type connotation to the text.
I don't work in programming, but "you can do hard things" applies to my work as well. It drives me nuts when coworkers refer to me as really smart when in fact I'm merely curious. "I have no idea how you did that!" You should ask. That's how I learned it.
In my experience, curiosity and intelligence are very strongly correlated. There is a real gap between people with the curiosity and ability to explore and learn, and people without. This is often handwaved as "motivation" but it's more than just that.
In fact, the gap is so large that it can be really hard for a person on one side of it to understand how people on the other side think.
I think part of it is that geniuses gets (or at least feels) rewarded whenever they try learning, while other people might not. For the same amount of effort, the amount of new knowledge gained by other people is fewer than what geniuses can get. Overtime, leaning no longer feels worth it. Thus normal people no longer feels curious while geniuses still do.
People who cannot learn hard things don't have time, or they think they don't have time. Actually they try to fake their way through because they believe it is impossible or at least too late to sort things out properly.
The so called geniuses seem to have rather lax lifestyle, like free evenings to really make their homework. When you constantly think you're in hurry you've pretty much lost the game. You're just trying to get by and learn very little.
Your experience sounds rough.
My experience: I often thought that I didn't have the time to learn (hard) things, only to find out sooner or later that I actually did, and still do.
At work, this usually meant that I was giving myself tighter deadlines than they needed to be, or that I was putting too much effort into tasks nobody cared that much about. Over time, I learned that it's OK not to put 100% of energy into the assigned task. Sometimes, it's even encouraged to use that extra energy to learn.
Arguably, I did have the privilege of starting out in salaried European office jobs, where there are more robust boundaries and opportunities. It's obvious how precarious physical work discourages this kind of learning. And reading comments like yours, it's clear how lucky I was to have managers and environments that didn't exploit my eagerness to put pressure on myself.
But if you do have an opportunity to make adjustments, I'd suggest putting less pressure on performing like an athlete, and channeling that energy into learning opportunities instead. Rarely will anyone carve out time for your learning, but they may be responsive to your request or boundaries.
This is true, you only grow when you have nothing to do. At least, nothing that other people are telling you to do. If there's something you want to learn really bad I highly recommend taking a sabbatical and just spending the whole year learning that topic deeply. You can get to the bleeding edge of most topics in one year of study, especially ones adjacent to what you already know. I did this in my 20s and can't wait for the stars to align to be able to do this again.
it's also a burden when it's the team culture, because you're almost seen negatively for trying to design new things
This all is good advice. Don't be intimidated, try new things, have fun.
On top of that, keep your day job. Or have enough wealth to not need it. Otherwise fun may cease gradually, then abruptly. Keep the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid well-maintained.
I definitely worked with people who were limited by how much they were open to just dive one level deeper. You can wait for someone to explain things to you and tell you what to read, or just... go and do it. There's no speed limit in learning. This is even easier now with AI since you can ask "what's this concept called, what am I missing here, what stuff should I read about it" if you're actually blocked.
>On top of that, keep your day job.
I have unfortunately failed at that :(. The fun sure does go away slowly, then all at once
This is like “draw the rest of the owl” advice. Most people struggle with the earn enough money to afford house in metro with multiple employers step. And earn enough money per hour to have time for other stuff.
The Practice Guide of Computer is really a gem, and the bottom lines sentences are just golden (now I understand what they meant when people mentioned bottom lines) of part D: Rid yourself of the following reasons of being a practioner of computer.
To add a cliche, according to Mark Twain, "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life". Or may I add, you probably not going to retire anytime soon.
A famous quote by Winston Churchill’s mother on meeting Gladstone and Disraeli is, “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.” How people make us feel is so important — not only in Leadership but also in life.
The ability to be genuinely interested in what someone else has to say and what their opinions are is a real gift.
> i really, sincerely, believe that art is one of the most important uses for a computer.
Me too. Sometimes when I tell people I spent the day on the computer, I get responses like "oh that's sad" or "you're going to burn yourself out".
Would they say the same thing if I told them I spent the day painting in my studio? Or playing the guitar? Or writing a piece of music? The computer is my paintbrush.
Most people probably assume that you're consuming rather than creating, consumption is what most people do on computers
Not addressing the content directly but a note on the formatting:
I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.
My take is that it stems from the way we chat with others online, where we might be freer with our formatting as we type out messages in IRC/Discord/wherever. It's meant to convey "down to earth"-ness or speaking plainly, which I find fitting given the content of the post.
The other one that I find jarring is putting a zero in front of the year.
I down vote it every time I see it.
i think it's either the result of a stream of consciousness into one's phone hastily formatted into a blog post, or something constructed to resemble that. the rushed construction slash abrasive rhetorical tool kinda matches the message it's trying to send, imo. it's often that the amount of time i've spent thinking about something (a lot) is totally disproportionate to the time i spend typing my thoughts up (a little). the graphics feel like someone sending an image in between chat messages
Phones will automatically add the basic correct grammar for you. I would also argue that if you can touch type then writing in all lowercase is again more difficult than adding the correct (basic) grammar.
>i think it's either the result of a stream of consciousness into one's phone
I don't know about Android but on the iPhone you have to go out of your way to remove the capitalisation.
> it's often that the amount of time i've spent thinking about something (a lot) is totally disproportionate to the time i spend typing my thoughts up (a little)
oh, this is a really good way of putting it! that’s exactly what happened :)
Are you saying that you were too busy thinking to put capitals at the start of sentences？ Is that a joke?
It's a signal they want to put out that they don't respect the rules of grammar.
They'll grow out of it and one-day look back and cringe, as we all tend to do eventually.
It's really hard to read. There's "text-transform: capitalize;" which puts things in Title Case but unfortunately that is also hard to read for body text. ( That Was a Trend Too For a While If You Remember. ).
hitting upper case on each word doesn't feel ergonomic but rather aesthetical. if we have periods, why do we need upper case? or why we don't have auto-capitalize globally activated in every text-box? as someone who type like this on my blog; i refuse to hit shift everytime i bring a period into any text, as well not using period at the end of any paragraph and not capitalizing "i", because otherwise, i want "YOU" and "WE" and "HE" and "THOU /j
I don't find it any harder or easier. Reading is not difficult and hasn't been since kindergarten for me. If anything, the British bastardizations of the Oxford spelling of words like "capitalization" with a z, because Pocket Fowler's Modern English thought the Americans were too crude and wished to emulate a more continental style, makes reading clumsier.
I hate that people comment on this. It's a fascinating linguistic phenomenon that bothers some people but signals to others that it's for them, in a way. Linguistics is a descriptive, not a prescriptive, field. Humans have been speaking and writing in a myriad of ways for thousands of years that do not strictly correspond to the current du jour.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
I hate it when people do this. I refuse to write Bell Hooks or E. E. Cummings without capitals. Even though it's vanishingly unlikely, I hope they both read this from beyond the grave and think about what they've done to reading comprehension.
Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase will only grow worse.
eNGLISH is a lingua franca, so it's prone to morph much more than without the status. do you really think a blogger or 5 will change how upper case exist? maybe we'll signal something with exacerbation by some unicode somewhere at the phrase. maybe we'll type with the help of AI (fuck ai). maybe English will have augmentative and diminutive word forms like Portuguese. maybe grammar will be simpler, so more people can use it and even with a simpler language, like Chinese, you still can express deep stuff, with more words/characters but then, how often your typing or reading something serious? there's a big difference between a blog and a journal from a psychologist evaluating meaningless activities as the precursor/variable of hapiness or satisfaction (or whatever the correct scientific term is)
Hopefully this conversation plays out a million times whenever someone decides to make sentence boundaries harder to recognise for no reason, and together we can all make a difference.
> I hope they both read this from beyond the grave and think about what they've done to reading comprehension.
what have they done, other than essentially nothing, to reading comprehension?
maDe iT muCH WORse for aNyone wITH A viSUAL OR COgniTive impaiRment bY trEATinG capItalIsation as UNImporTanT.
I hate it. It’s so much harder for me to read when they opt out of using some of the tools in their written language toolbox.
My understanding is that it’s basically just a newer fad.
I've recently read the great moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue", and in it he defines a "practice" as:
> "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."
Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.
MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.
I really resonate with it. When I was a teenager I was a burn out. I went to college and became enamoured with a field of study. Everyone thought I was very smart and people would drop the g word and it made me feel gross. I always just wanted to learn everything I could.
Now I am in a very different area of practice. Partially because I got tired of being good. Making young professionals give talks to factory floors about things they can't relate too, getting hired because it would look good for an acquisition, etc. it's draining and makes it hard for colleagues to realize they are your equal or even more exceptional at many things than yourself.
I actually worked with Jyn, though we don't keep in touch I will say they were great. Made strong contributions, learned new things quickly and was genuinely curious about everything. It's cool to see them on here. Nothing but good wishes for them and I hope they are enjoying whatever they are doing now. Come to think of it, I feel that way about all my former colleagues.
What a wonderful article. My stress has been drowning my joy in something I once found fulfilling. While reading this, I suddenly remembered it. Thank you.
What has been causing you stress? (If you don’t mind me asking?)
It's nothing special. I'm an academic and usually I balance my desire to work / deadlines and family obligations. The last month I screwed up my management and got frustrated at both. I was holding that emotion even after crunch-time had passed.
Sometimes a lighthearted piece is all you need to remember to release. What's the saying? "The sea of bitterness is vast. Turn back, and you may yet see shore." I still love what I do, even if it got tougher than expected for a moment.
I feel like I can't have fun anymore because the AI can just do the thing instantly and you've got people on this website advocating to let the AI do everything while you merely read the code.
I felt similar for most of 2025. Then at some point something clicked and now I work on side projects again without AI.
Can AI do it faster? Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is having fun.
The analogy I keep going to in my mind is chess. A computer can play chess on my behalf, or I can play chess myself, but only one is fun.
Ignore the AI people. In all probability, you were doing something similar before. The Internet is full of developers. Some may be faster at writing code than you are, or maybe they wrote better code, or perhaps they implemented your ideas before you even thought them up. Yet it sounds like you didn't let that inhibit you before.
I think it’s more complicated that. LLMs have allowed me to do things that I couldn’t do before which definitely made programming and hacking things together more fun, and massively increased what I could do in my limited free time. It also allowed me to manually do the things I enjoy while making the less fun parts go faster. On the other hand I recently tried doing a larger project in codex and it wasn’t fun anymore because codex quickly created a system that was way beyond my understanding, it didn’t work, and I had no idea how to fix it. So I guess it just depends how you use it.
why do you have to do what people on this website tell you? Write the fun thing.
It can't possibly do everything; mind reading interfaces haven't been invented yet. Paul Graham goes on about how writing is thinking. Just the act of writing out instructions can be fun.
AI is the latest line of trends. It will pass like everything else. Unless they are offering to buddy up with you for a project, why care about how other people would do it?
For now, do what interests you in a way that interests you.
Who cares? Just disable or pay no heed to AI. Did you stop correcting your prose because spellcheck or grammarly could do it for you? Sometimes the human thing to do is to be the opposite of the zeitgeist.
I have been doing a lot of little projects using AI, and don't get this experience.
I get what this post is talking about. I'm just having fun, that comes in a lot of different flavours. I can try a lot more ideas out, that's fun. I can quickly learn if an idea won't work, sometimes that can be disappointing but at the same time learning why it won't work can be quite fun. When the AI utterly fails to do something it lets me develop an idea in my mind about the strengths and weaknesses of the models. Oftentimes the failures are not just fun but outright hilarious. I enjoy seeing models fail sometimes because they reveal an assumption that I have internallsed to the point of being unaware of it's presence. It reveals to me something about myself when something I didn't feel worth mentioning is actually quite important to communicate. Some of the failures are outright hilarious.
I do find it a bit tiring to use AI for long periods, because lazy thinking produces poor results. You have to maintain a clear idea of what it is you are trying to do. Quite often an idea can seem simple in your head because you have glossed over a number of complicating details. I find it a challenge to keep mind at a level where you are aware of these things before you request an AI to make something intrinsically flawed.
I don't have a problem doing things without AI just for fun either. I make animated images in a tiny stack machine bytecode. I do game jams, and code golfing, like dweets.
I also enjoy playing chess, computers pased my ability to play chess a long way back. I don't mind playing even when I know a computer can do better.
Unless you are the best in the world at a thing, there's always someone who could do it better, every attempt to do the best thing ever in a field will fail. On the other hand you can try and do better that what you yourself have done. Even then that's just the target to reach for. The real goal is to enjoy the reaching. It's the challenge at the limits that is fun, not the success or failure of the end result.
I have fun, but I probably wouldn't if the AI was right all the time. Or if I was helpless when it was wrong. But for now I'm still in the centaur zone.
Mostly FUD from grifters and accelerationists. Coding AI isn't useful for producing things that you couldn't have produced yourself, which means you're still important. Fundamentally it's still "just" an autocomplete, whether it's snippets at your cursor or whole files inside your directory. I actually quite enjoy LLMs as a programmer. Contrast this with compilers, which produce machine code that you couldn't have possibly written yourself.
I've not used AI to write code, but everyone who I've spoken to who has says it actually takes a lot of work. It sounds like you get intern level work out of AI, but without the hope that your investment in time results in skills and personal development for the intern.
All of the fighting with the LLM to refine the results sounds tiresome. No thanks.
If it's fun for you, or it unblocks you, or whatever... Go for it. But it doesn't sound fun for me, so nope. I'll keep banging on rocks to write programs until that's not fun anymore. :p
one of my favorite quotes of all time: "the master has failed more times than the novice has even tried"
Finally some practical daily affirmations for computer
I like doing goofy things with code. I wrote an s-expression parser using TeraTerm (BASIC-like language). I came up with this generator only recursive descent thing in python. I never did anything with these except to fiddle around and see what was possible. Goofy stuff in code makes me happy.
”it's by repeatedly forcing you to confront the results of your own mistakes”
Damn, that’s powerful.
Dear Mitchell Hashicorp,
I’m sorry for not taking your terminal emulator serious.
Your comment on the red site resonated.
> I have a perpetual chip on my shoulder because I'm also in the camp of doing things primarily motivated by having fun, but people in and out of my life repeatedly not taking it seriously. You can have fun and also consider your work serious (or, have it actually be serious by various metrics).
Refreshing, after narration that usually goes along the lines that if you can’t make transistor from sand grains while also knowing all the http details, databases and of course all JS frameworks you are not “real programmer”.
Why do some people hate capital letters?
this forum probably isn't the best place to make that statement, though I can see both of us didn't take that hint when we made our names
What is this new blog trend where I see capitalization disappearing ?
It's a helpful indicator that the article isn't worth reading and that it was probably written by somebody who spends too much time in chatrooms.
This hits different when you apply it to chess.
Instead of obsessing with my rating on I just turned on Zen mode in lichees and hid all the numbers.
The game became fun again — Just "oh that was a cool tactic, let me try this weird opening, what happens if I sacrifice my knight for vibes?"
Turns out the rating was a distraction from the actual game.
Same energy as your point about "fucking around" being the point.
The elo was just making me miserable; removing it made me better anyway.
It’s great advice and exactly how I live my life. Programming was a hobby and then a profession, I still use the phrase ‘working’ but really it’s play with outcomes.
Who's jyn?
I like it. I've worked with the occasional programmer artist (at least one has an HN account). Not in the "elegant and austere like a suspension bridge" sense, but in the "what the fuck? no! stop reorienting my brain!" sense. They're rare and precious like a delicate orchid, and annoying as hell like a delicate orchid that gives you a rash.
That magenta PR? Fetch.
I don't know what I expected from a blog written entirely in lowercase but I'm unsurprised it's something like this.
> if i can't feminize my compiler, what's the point?
I remember when people saying things like this would be considered strange, because it is strange, along with all the other bizarre and often fetishistic references in both the blog body and various screenshots. Same for the bizarre pull request screenshot referring to "the gay people in my phone", which is also devoid of grammar.
It's one thing to act stupidly, it's another thing to act stupidly write a self-important blog about it and how much you enjoy pissing people off (back in the day we called that trolling, believe it or not, and it was largely considered a negative thing). I eagerly await the paradigm shift when people stop condoning and supporting bizarre behaviour like this and I won't need to create proxies and extensions explicitly for filtering this kind of nonsense out.
I find the worst thing about this not the blog post itself, but the fact that the majority people on here see no problem with it and those who agree with me are being flagged to death.
It's ok to be strange. It's ok to be bizarre. Be free.
I do not understand the desire for everybody else in the world to act exactly like you. Variety is the spice of life.
People can be strange or bizarre if they want too but they have to understand it means some people won't like them, especially if their shtick is deliberately making people uncomfortable and being annoying.
> I do not understand the desire for everybody else in the world to act exactly like you. Variety is the spice of life.
I don't want people to act exactly like me. I greatly appreciate the existence of people different from me with differing points of view and differing nations with differing cultures. This doesn't mean I have to like one specific archetype that I feel acts obnoxiously.
Why do you feel uncomfortable? Why do you think anyone is trying to make you feel uncomfortable?
The author quite literally mentions that part of their motivation to do things is to make people want them to stop, not to mention the deliberate and conscious choice to write the article in lowercase.
It's also natural to be uncomfortable because of the various references to sexual fetishes throughout the article.
> to make people want them to stop
in the sense of "writing a brainfuck compiler in ed," not in making them so uncomfortable they beg for release. plus, "feminization" is not a fetish, at least in the sense of making rustc say "i love you;" that feels incredibly uncharitable.
I don't see any references to "sexual fetishes" in the article.
That's impressive considering the article mentions "feminizing" things in big text the moment you load the page.
"feminizing" doesn't refer to a sexual fetish, it just means making something more feminine. Do you assume that something being feminine is automatically sexualized and fetishistic?
I knew you were going to say this.
"Feminizing" doesn't inherently refer to a sexual fetish but context matters. I invite you to examine the article more in depth, look at the chatroom conversations and then come to your own conclusion.
The world was a much better place when engineering was done by men in dress shirts, who saw technical excellence as their professional obligation, but then returned home to their families and could leave their professional life behind.
People like this make me hate everything to do with software. Software should be an engineering field, which exists to help humans, not as some personal art project for your self expression. I do not want to interact with these people at all. If you derive your identity from being a programmer you are actually harmful and I hope that I will never have the misfortune of having to work with you.
And yes, if you do not capitalize properly, then I do not see you as fully human. And if you keep swearing you sound like a twelve year old.
> If you derive your identity from being a programmer you are actually harmful
why mandate compartmentalization to this extent? what is so harmful about software as art (or expression, etc.)? if i write a weird personal project, what "misfortune" would i bring to you as a coworker, lol
Are you seriously writing on ycombinator that the zenith of computer engineering was the early 70's when HP, Digital, and IBM ruled the world?
> Software should be an engineering field, which exists to help humans, not as some personal art project for your self expression
it makes me sad that you see these things as somehow in conflict with each other :(
It fills me with joy to know that those are irreconcilable. It lifts the burden of having to reconcile these things and I know that my self expression can be directed elsewhere.
Whatever beauty exists in engineering comes from the purity of it. A fighter plane or a microchip looks beautiful, not because it was designed to be so, but because of the purity of the functionality, the harshness of the requirements. If you turn a fighter plane into an art project, then it will be inherently ridiculous. It will make a mockery of its own purpose, looking at it will be like looking at a cripple.
> People like this make me hate everything to do with software
Well, the people that code for fun (and profit) think you, the men in suits, ruined everything so at least the feeling is reciprocal.
Well, since those men in shirts built the whole thing up, I am not disappointed that they are hated for it by the right people.
>suits
shirts was what I said. Not suits.
Starting a blog like with "it's not a competition" in a capitalist societity is straight up igmorant. Yes it is not as much competition, if you are already so far ahead of others, that it doesn't matter for YOU, right now.
they clarify that point in the first sentence of that header,
> i mean, in some sense if you work as a professional programmer it is a competition, because the job market sucks right now.
"Reasons to do computer:
1. To contribute to the world's spiritual growth"
...damn, there go (out) most computer jobs!
The cutesy writing style is a bit irritating, plus the article is one big ego stroke.
Could you, HackerNews reader, imagine yourself writing something like this? No? It's because you're not a narcissist.
If we are maximising our input I should only read things I wouldn't write.
That's the beauty of communication and the free internet, what a joy to learn about someone elses way of thinking, add a little colour to my world view.
One of the things I miss most about the days of IRC chat networks, the personalities were big, broad and diverse, all mixing together. If someone is a narcissist, so be it, they still have value, knowledge, opinions to share. Online discourse these days can verge on corporate approved, totally empty. Apologies for the tangent.
>Could you, HackerNews reader, imagine yourself writing something like this?
Maybe in more optimistic times. "Just have fun" is a top luxury nowadays in 2025.
There's a differences between narcissism and self-awareness.
It would be narcissism if the author didn't have talent or ability. That doesn't seem to be the case here.
jyn’s advice here is spot on, however it misses an important point: jyn you are exceptional because you do these things. This is what excellence looks like.
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What the actual fuck?
What does your comment mean? Is there some sort of substance to your statement or are you just being a hateful troll?
Did you even read the post? Are you trying to draw some conclusion from a person’s appearance?
I don’t know Jyn Nelson, but I have seen some of their talks. They seem to be a more than capable developer. Their blog is probably one of the least offensive, most down to earth, get shot done type of developer blog I have seen? So again, what the actual fuck.
(I’m not certain if the ‘seven words you can’t say on television’ are actually banned on HN or just frowned upon, but I think my usage is justified)
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You know you could simply pass by ignoring this article since you claim it doesn't apply to you.
But uhh, your need to put the author down is revealing.
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Starting a blog like with "it's not a competition" in a capitalist societity is straight up igmorant. Yes it is not as much competition, if you are already so far ahead of others, that it doesn't matter for YOU, right now.
I see these blogs sometimes and they smell like Adderal. Have you considered that the thing you’re endlessly tinkering with may not be the thing actually providing the enjoyment you feel?
It's amazing how such a short comment manages to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of stimulants, tinkering, human nature and, implicitly, neurodivergence.
Are you saying everyone who programs is on adderal? I don't understand.