Top all-time · #20773
Ben Carlsson
Personal blog · twos.dev · on HN as glacialsdesignwritingculture
Ben Carlsson's personal blog at twos.dev covers design, writing and culture. Since 2019, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Advanced Dashes”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link twos.dev's dashes page as a guide to em dash, en dash and hyphen use. One commenter presented it as a more advanced follow-up to basic punctuation overviews such as the HN submission.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Advanced Dashes2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-07-03
- The Remote Pop-In (2021)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-05
What Hacker News says?
https://twos.dev Previously had a fancy schmancy Vue site with components and good practices and a good (for an engineer) design—the works. Then one day I was in the mountains with a bad connection and couldn’t even npm install the dang thing to work on it. Rage-rewrote the whole thing in raw HTML on the spot, haven’t looked back.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted The Remote Pop-In (2021) as a story · 95 points
HN discussionLocation: Seattle, WA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Go, Ruby on Rails, Python, TypeScript Résumé/CV: https://twos.dev/cv.html Email: ben@twos.dev Ten years in industry. I was #90 at Twitch and grew it to, through, and past its $1B Amazon acquisition. I've been successful in backend and low-JS full stack roles, including bleeding edge HTML/CSS. Very experienced in Go and Ruby on Rails, experienced…
Comment linking /cv.html
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2024)”Submitted Anonymously Autistic as a story · 4 points
HN discussionLocation: Seattle, WA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Ruby, Go, Python, TypeScript Résumé/CV: https://twos.dev/cv.html Email: ben@twos.dev Ten years in the industry. I was #90 at Twitch and grew it to its $1B Amazon acquisition. I've been successful backend and full stack. I have a special eye for increasing developer velocity. I thrive in small companies with teammates who trust each other, where…
Comment linking /cv.html
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2024)”Submitted Wholesome Great Filters as a story · 3 points
HN discussionLocation: Seattle, WA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Go, Ruby on Rails, Python, TypeScript Résumé/CV: https://twos.dev/cv.html Email: ben@twos.dev Ten years in industry. I was #90 at Twitch and grew it to its $1B Amazon acquisition. I've been successful backend and full stack. Very experienced in Go and Ruby on Rails. I have a special eye for increasing developer velocity. I thrive in small compan…
Comment linking /cv.html
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2024)”Submitted When the April Fool’s Day Prank Is Real as a story · 3 points
HN discussion- Location: Seattle, WA. - Remote: Remote or onsite in Seattle. - Willing to relocate: Not willing. - Technologies: Go, Ruby / Ruby on Rails, Python, TypeScript, AWS. Interested in Haskell and Elixir. - Résumé/CV: https://twos.dev/cv.html - Email: ben@twos.dev - Website: https://twos.dev/ I'm a staff/principal level Software Engineer, full-stack for low/no-JS or backend otherwise. I've worked "in the open" a lot so…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2024)”Submitted The Remote Pop-In as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAuthor here, happy to see some discussion around this. I see two major classes of comments. 1. “Why not accomplish this with X?” We arrived at this solution organically, which was important for adoption: a Discord server meant for gaming hour turned into hangout rooms turned into offices. It may not be the best option, but best means nil if you can’t convince people to use it. For us and our existing culture, Discor…
Comment linking /async.html
on “The Remote Pop-In (2021)”Submitted Gut-Driven Development as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA little different: I wrote a bespoke static site generator [1] for my personal website to allow my favorite mobile writing app to be a “frontend” that I can use to write+publish content from my phone (no code) to a Git data storage layer. An iOS Shortcut pushes every time I close my writing app. The weird part is it’s the same Git repository I also write the code parts in, so I have to take some measures to compart…
Comment linking /winter
on “Ask HN: Apps that are built with Git as the back end?”Submitted Surprises in North China as a story · 2 points
HN discussionInteresting! I recently wrote about this in the context of Google and Apple ecosystems and did not know it had a name. [1] I called in offline-first vs. online-first design. [1]: https://twos.dev/apple.html#offline
Comment linking /apple.html
on “CDC File Transfer”Submitted Why Be Synchronous? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFor a little more on these with a focus on CSS and practical issues, I wrote an article a couple years back called Advanced Dashes: https://twos.dev/dashes.html
Comment linking /dashes.html
on “Punctuation Matters: How to use the en dash, em dash and hyphen”Submitted From Google to Apple as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFor a somewhat more advanced (and IMHO much more beautifully typeset) but still succinct overview of em dash (and some other dashes) in practical use, see https://twos.dev/dashes.html . Suitable for those who are familiar with punctuation basics but may want a refresher, and AFAICT gets some things more correctly (e.g., the numbers in a range are generally separated by a figure dash, not en dash).
Comment linking /dashes.html
on “Punctuation Matters: How to use the en dash, em dash and hyphen”Submitted Tattoos as Moral Contracts as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIn the autism community we call this "masking" and it is not the least bit surprising to read this. I did not begin to learn I had anxiety or autism until I was 30 years old, and it's because the world trained me to hide away those parts of myself. I did not realize I was masking for most of my life -- most do not since it's the only way they've ever lived -- but it is enormously taxing to be around people. Everyone…
Comment linking /autism.html
on “Camouflaging autistic traits linked to internalizing symptoms anxiety depression”Submitted Effective English as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ignore Individuals. Fix Systems as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Form Is Function as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Advanced Dashes as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Advanced Dashes as a story · 1 points
HN discussion