Top all-time · #2640
Caleb Hearth
Personal blog · calebhearth.comwebprogramming
Caleb Hearth writes Hearthside, a personal blog at calebhearth.com about web and programming. Since 2020, 29 different Hacker News readers have linked it 53 times, most often “Don't Get Distracted (2017)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (21) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Caleb Hearth's essay "Don't get distracted" tells of a software engineer who took a job building software to kill people, and HN links it in discussions of military tech, AI and surveillance. Also has git SSH-signing posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 21 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Don't Get Distracted (2017)19 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2022-11-20
- Signing Git commits with your SSH key (2021)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-11-16
- How to deeplink to a specific section of text on almost any website2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-04
What Hacker News says?
May I recommend Caleb Hearth's Don't get distracted ? https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
Comment linking /dont-get-distracted
on “Margaret Hamilton has died”Submitted Don't Get Distracted (2017) as a story · 206 points
HN discussion- 63 · 2026-09-22
It's easy to blame the military and the higher-ups, after all they made this choice. But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir. > A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there is no evidence its software was at fault. If you work for Palantir, you…
Comment linking /dont-get-distracted
on “Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school” Submitted Signing Git commits with your SSH key (2021) as a story · 201 points
HN discussionThe problem is not the PowerShell itself, maybe even not the fact it has telemetry, but how it collects the telemetry and how Microsoft sees telemetry as the only and ultimate way to measure things. I understand that Microsoft believes in "show me numbers or GTFO", but the problem is they ignore Goodhart's law repeatedly, and they don't learn from their mistake. To recap; "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases…
Comment linking /dont-get-distracted
on “Performance and telemetry analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode fork”Submitted Signing Git Commits with Your SSH Key as a story · 13 points
HN discussionDevelopment of programming languages by corporations is not something I object but, all of the stuff told about Oracle here is correct. They're not a nice entity unless you pay money to them and they're greedy. They always want more. Also, their hardware can fail in strange ways and they'd shrug it off. I've met with some nice people who migrated from Sun but they all say that the terms they work are draconian. I li…
Comment linking /talks/dont-get-distracted
on “CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream”Submitted Drawing a Hex Grid in SwiftUI as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis sounds like Caleb Thompson's "Don't Get Distracted" talk. - https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz7r_gZhYyA
Comment linking /dont-get-distracted
on “Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?”Submitted "Don't Get Distracted" – writing software that may be used to harm others as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI feel that trying to make SSH keys short-lived is becoming more painful each year because there's an increase of tools that use SSH keys for purposes other than SSH logins. For example, age [1] encrypts files with SSH keys, agenix [2] does secrets management with it, Git can now sign commits with it [3], and even ssh-keygen can now sign arbitrary data [4]. All of these become useless the moment you start using shor…
Comment linking /sign-git-with-ssh
on “If you’re not using SSH certificates you’re doing SSH wrong (2019)”Submitted Signing Git commits with your SSH key as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou'll need to re-upload your public SSH key as a signing key for the signatures to be shown as verified. https://calebhearth.com/sign-git-with-ssh#github
Comment linking /sign-git-with-ssh
on “SSH commit verification now supported”Submitted Clamp() for Responsive Design as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNeat, I didn't even know you can sign git commits with SSH! Seems to be a pretty new feature too; [1] claims it's from November 2021. [1] https://calebhearth.com/sign-git-with-ssh
Comment linking /sign-git-with-ssh
on “SSH commit verification now supported”Submitted Don't Get Distracted as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGood essay about this: https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
Comment linking /dont-get-distracted
on “Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program”Submitted I (View)Model SwiftUI Views as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSorry, I had missed this. The format is [gpg] format = ssh [user] signingKey = key::SSH-PUBKEY In my case, since I have an ssh-ed25519 key, it is [user] signingKey = key::ssh-ed25519 AAAAC… You can pretty much copy the `.pub` key and paste it after `key::` (instructions like the ones at https://calebhearth.com/sign-git-with-ssh will show this without the `key::` prefix; according to the latest git documentation, the…
Comment linking /sign-git-with-ssh
on “Gitsign”Submitted How to Send a Webmention with h-entry as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGitHub just needs support for SSH-based commit signing. https://calebhearth.com/sign-git-with-ssh
Comment linking /sign-git-with-ssh
on “Gitsign”Submitted Ask Git to Show a Method as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> I'm going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don't get distracted by that; I didn't know at the time. — Caleb Hearth 1. https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBdBoWAtLNI
Comment linking /dont-get-distracted
on “Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder If They're the Bad Guys”Submitted Use Curl and Jq to Send Webmentions from Hacker News as a story · 2 points
HN discussionDon't Get Distracted https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
Comment linking /dont-get-distracted
on “Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system”Submitted Build Colors from Colors with CSS Relative Color Syntax as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. >But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time. Caleb Hearth: "Don't Get Distracted" https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
Comment linking /dont-get-distracted
on “Where things stand with the Department of War”Submitted Swift-Format GitHub Action as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere are not enough ethics courses being taught in schools and universities. https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
Comment linking /dont-get-distracted
on “Palantir and Anthropic AI helped the US hit 1k Iran targets in 24 hours”Submitted Rails Gem for Webmention as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
