Top all-time · #4451
Alec Nevala-Lee
Personal blog · nevalalee.wordpress.comwritingculture
Alec Nevala-Lee's personal blog at nevalalee.wordpress.com covers writing and culture. Since 2014, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “The hotel bathroom puzzle”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-06-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Essays by Alec Nevala-Lee on history, science fiction, Borges, and retro hardware and ads. Commenters cite them as related reading and sources for their own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The archived blog posts of author Alec Nevala-Lee
Most-linked posts?
- The hotel bathroom puzzle2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-07-14
What Hacker News says?
The idea of using a fake result to break a paradigm has been used in a number of science fiction stories. I believe that the earliest is "Noise Level" (1952) by Raymond F. Jones, though the idea originated with John W. Campbell [0]. I first came across this concept in Robert Silverberg's "Double Dare" (1956) [1]. [0] https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2016/09/28/astounding-storie... [1] https://archive.org/stream/galax…
Comment linking /2016/09/28/astounding-stories-18-noise-level/
on “Lessons Learned from Shenzhen I/O”Submitted The hotel bathroom puzzle as a story · 561 points
HN discussionBorges absolutely would not stop doing this [2]. His reasoning was that writing whole books was a lot of work, whereas writing book reviews was much easier, and let you get much the same ideas across [1]: It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it…
Comment linking /2017/06/21/the-borges-test/
on “Plagiarized in a plagiarism atonement essay”Submitted Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016) as a story · 64 points
HN discussionIn Discordianism, there is something called the Law of Fives[1], which says, 'all things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5.' There is also a memo from one founder to another quoted which says, 'I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look.' Robert Anton Wilson has some interesting personal experiments about…
Comment linking /2016/04/04/looking-for-quarters/
on “Facebook ads told me to become a certified cryptozoologist, so I did”Submitted Acid test: on drugs and science fiction (2017) as a story · 51 points
HN discussionIt seems almost inconceivable that a long-form humanistic article like this would omit the fact that Kekulé discovered the ring structure of benzene in a dream about the ouroboros : https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/friedrich-august-... Surely that's a guaranteed crowd-pleaser!
Comment linking /2011/05/29/friedrich-august-kekule-on-an-unusual-dream/
on “How the Benzene Tree Polluted the World”Submitted The disintegrating cube as a story · 44 points
HN discussionThe second part: https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2016/07/12/the-alphabet-meth...
Comment linking /2016/07/12/the-alphabet-method/
on “Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)”Submitted A Song of DOS and WordStar as a story · 27 points
HN discussionIt’s almost always in the Eureka Zone. https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2014/04/19/the-eureka-zone/
Comment linking /2014/04/19/the-eureka-zone/
on “Ghost Boat with Garmin GPS Leads Father-Son Duo to Man Overboard”Submitted The Creeps of the Cosmos (2017) as a story · 26 points
HN discussionthis article by the same author is also very interesting: https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2018/04/16/the-kitsch-of-sur...
Comment linking /2018/04/16/the-kitsch-of-survival-2/
on “The soul of a new machine (2018)”Submitted The soul of a new machine (2018) as a story · 26 points
HN discussionIt's not just your opinion, it's a Nintendo design philosophy:) https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/withered-hardware... Though that said the N64 was supposedly a lot more advanced than the ps1, though I think that is debatable. Also the snes feels more advanced than the megadrive to me (genesis in America) Makes me want to dig out my gameboy color...
Comment linking /2014/01/09/withered-hardware-lateral-thinking/
on “Steam Deck’s Greatness Makes It Hard to Go Back to the Switch”Submitted Hubbard and the Empress (2018) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI wonder if we can say that that's because of the poor (ad) design (even though they are just ads and not instructions exactly). “When simple things need instructions, it is a certain sign of poor design.”[0] [0] https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2015/11/27/the-hotel-bathroo... (related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532682 )
Comment linking /2015/11/27/the-hotel-bathroom-puzzle/
on “Vintage Ad Browser”Submitted The Living Wage: On Robert Heinlein and Universal Basic Income as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOther interesting sources: https://kk.org/thetechnium/one-dead-media/ https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/the-book-of-mcbee...
Comment linking /2015/11/17/the-book-of-mcbees/
on “Edge-Notched Card”Submitted The Unfinished Lives (2018) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Thing from Another Manuscript (2018) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Wounded Knee, the Achilles Heel, and Elizabeth Warren as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
