Top all-time · #2074
Amjad Masad
Personal blog · amasad.meprogrammingstartups
Amjad Masad's personal blog at amasad.me covers programming and startups. Since 2014, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 83 times, most often “John Carmack on (Antifragile) Idea Generation (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Amjad Masad's site
Most-linked posts?
- John Carmack on (Antifragile) Idea Generation (2016)5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-01-11
- On Hosting Sites from Your Editor4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-03-08
- Beware the Metagame4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-10-31
- Easier Concurrent Programming in JavaScript with Async Functions3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-11-02
- 50th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (2018)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-12-10
- How to Keep Winning3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-10-24
- The Hyperreal3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-03-14
- Mental Frames to Get Over Entrepreneurial Anxiety and Depression3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-09-01
- Disintegrated Development Environments – How Did We Get Here?2 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2017-05-06
- Why Learn Compilers2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-12-29
What Hacker News says?
>what was the breaking point for you? It got exponentially harder to get out of bed and get to work. I just had to quit because I couldn't show up. I didn't give anytime to interview or find an offer. I was also in a weird situation with regards to immigration. So it was reckless but goes to show how much I had to leave. >How did you approach your recovery? Joined a big company, got myself on a path to be comfortabl…
Comment linking /2016
on “What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn”Submitted GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged as a story · 331 points
HN discussionThat's interesting -- thanks for sharing! I try to be as erudite in computer history as possible but I still somehow missed this. I pay homage to the Lisp community w/r/t programming interfaces in this post: https://amasad.me/disintegrated
Comment linking /disintegrated
on “CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Line”Submitted 50th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (2018) as a story · 302 points
HN discussionEddie Zaneski is an awesome and friendly guy! Here's another awesome article on it: http://amasad.me/2015/10/31/javascript-async-functions-for-e...
Comment linking /2015/10/31/javascript-async-functions-for-easier-concurrent-programming/
on “JavaScript async/await implemented in V8”Submitted John Carmack on Idea Generation as a story · 123 points
HN discussionTo add to this, one other way programming is getting harder is that there is no incremental path to becoming a developer. In the past, you could easily become a programmer by accident. You wanted to edit your MySpace page, google around, learn some HTML and do it. You wanted to mod a game, you started messing around with the game, download other mods, and change them. I think this incrementally is gone in two ways.…
Comment linking /disintegrated
on “Learning to program is getting harder”Submitted Overcoming Intuition in Programming as a story · 113 points
HN discussionRead my other post. Be grateful. https://amasad.me/grateful
Comment linking /grateful
on “GitHub and Open-Source Is a Boon for the Underprivileged”Submitted Do What Makes the Best Story as a story · 73 points
HN discussion>As much as people talk about "callback hell," it's never clear to me what problems they actually think they're having. It seems that as often as not, it's just a visceral dislike of indentation. It's surprisingly hard to articulate the problems. It's one of those things that you can experience but hard to explain. I tried to explain it[1] by going through the example of implement a vending machine[2] in various con…
Comment linking /2015/10/31/javascript-async-functions-for-easier-concurrent-programming/
on “Async and Await”Submitted Leapfrogging the IDE as a story · 65 points
HN discussionI wrote about something related as well: Disintegrated Development Environments — How Did We Get Here? https://amasad.me/disintegrated
Comment linking /disintegrated
on “Rome: A Linter for JavaScript and TypeScript”Submitted How to Keep Winning as a story · 57 points
HN discussionDeveloping that skill is really hard. It isn't the methodology. It's that you need the pervasive paranoiac scientific desire to poke holes in the idea. And that's very hard for most people. Carmack applies evidence to develop his posteriors very well. i.e. when evidence comes along for an idea you have, most people will say to themselves "Even though that's true it's not enough" or "but that doesn't disprove it". In…
Comment linking /carmack
on “John Carmack talks about “antifragile” idea generation (2015) [video]”Submitted Beware the Metagame as a story · 48 points
HN discussionOur marketing so embarrassingly out-of-date right now but yes we have a very robust hosting offering. It's still meant for side-projects and maybe early-stage startups. I wrote something on what it feels like to host an app from your editor: https://amasad.me/hosting
Comment linking /hosting
on “We Built Our Own DNS Infrastructure”Submitted The Stoic of Open Source as a story · 23 points
HN discussionA friend had sent this link. It dawned on me later, there is an interesting intersection between that article and this one about the Product Engineer: http://amasad.me/2016/01/03/overcoming-intuition-in-programm...
Comment linking /2016/01/03/overcoming-intuition-in-programming/
on “The Product Engineer”Submitted Lesser-Known JavaScript Debugging Techniques as a story · 19 points
HN discussionOh, internet drama. I love internet drama! So I looked it up as I never heard this story before. https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/ Looks like this CEO isn't of good character after all. He looks almost like a jerk when looking at the end of the story. Even in his last email he tried to get his (obviously wrong) point. He never apologized for the things that mattered most, only tried to extinguish the so…
Comment linking /meta
on “Replit's in-browser coding AI”Submitted Implementing Bret Victor's Learnable Programming Has Never Been Easier as a story · 13 points
HN discussion> That post feels like it approaches "conspiracy theory" levels of leaps While I don't agree that there is conspiracy going on, Replit's co-founder, amasad's post on entrepreneurship from 2016 kind of explains why his tweets outlining his outlook for the future of his company may come off as that: I view entrepreneurship as means of reconciling the infinite and finite. You venture into your imagination, gather knowl…
Comment linking /kierkegaard
on “Replit.com (YC W18) raises $80M Series B”Submitted Computers Doing the Right Thing as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI agree with this sentiment but why stop at JavaScript? With repl.it you can embed dozens of languages (albeit not yet editable in the embed). Here is a quick demo on my blog http://amasad.me/2015/04/09/hello-world/
Comment linking /2015/04/09/hello-world/
on “An interactive way of blogging about JavaScript”Submitted Building an In-Browser JavaScript VM and Debugger Using Generators as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI wrote another essay on how Lisp got a lot of things right but we ended up where we are today because Unix, aka the New Jersey approach, aka worse is better approach, had won over: https://amasad.me/disintegrated
Comment linking /disintegrated
on “Leapfrogging the IDE”Submitted Show HN: Embed runnable code snippets on your website as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI think the Lisp community invented tools that, had they been successful, would've altered the course of history with regards to devtools. I wrote an essay on this: https://amasad.me/disintegrated
Comment linking /disintegrated
on “Leapfrogging the IDE”Submitted Leapfrogging the IDE as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
