Top all-time · #336
James Somers
Personal blog · jsomers.netprogrammingwriting
James Somers's personal blog at jsomers.net covers programming and writing. Since 2008, 154 different Hacker News readers have linked it 244 times, most often “I should have loved biology”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 15 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link James Somers' essays, mainly 'You're probably using the wrong dictionary' and 'Speed matters', as writing they recommend, often as a favourite. Some also link his biology essays and his HN archive.
- Recommended for · 15 comments
- Called a favourite that changed one commenter's life, 'worth a read', and 'highly recommend all his work'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
James Somers is a writer and programmer based in New York.
Most-linked posts?
- I should have loved biology17 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2020-11-18
- You’re probably using the wrong dictionary (2014)17 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2014-05-19
- E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction [pdf]14 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2016-10-20
- Using the wrong dictionary (2014)11 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2021-04-20
- /hn/10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-02-23
- “It turns out”10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2010-03-03
- Why more people should write6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-01-04
- It Turns Out6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-12-07
- Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-02-02
- Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-07-28
What Hacker News says?
James Somers’ You’re probably using the wrong dictionary (2014) changed my life for the better. https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage is a phenomenal resource as well.
Comment linking /blog/dictionary
on “When did Google get so weird?”Submitted I should have loved biology as a story · 1048 points
HN discussionMy favorite essay on this topic, not yet referenced, is James Somers's "Speed matters:" https://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters
Comment linking /blog/speed-matters
on “Fast”Submitted Show HN: Hacker News Classics as a story · 864 points
HN discussionMade me think of It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs. The language alone was evocative. It suggested that the embryo—DNA making RNA, RNA making protein, protein regulating the transcription of DNA into RNA—was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code contai…
Comment linking /i-should-have-loved-biology/
on “Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment”Submitted I should have loved biology as a story · 800 points
HN discussionI will post this in defence of speed. https://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters
Comment linking /blog/speed-matters
on “Slow”Submitted I should have loved biology (2020) as a story · 685 points
HN discussion"Any way this could be done without requiring Javascript?" Could be done many ways. Lets imagine you like text, you dont mind reading something somewhat structured and regular like json and you dont need all the html, css, etc. tags and window dressing. 5-minute quick and dirty solution 1. curl -4o 1.htm http://jsomers.net/hn/stories.json tr , '\12' < 1.htm \ |exec sed ' 1i\ <pre> /./{ /{\"/,/}/!d; } /\"url\":[^{]/{…
Comment linking /hn/stories.json
on “Show HN: Hacker News Classics”Submitted Using the wrong dictionary as a story · 635 points
HN discussionWith regards to Classics, the "You're probably using the wrong dictionary" blog post at http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary was probably the most interesting pieces I've read on HN.
Comment linking /blog/dictionary
on “Show HN: Hacker News Classics”Submitted A three-page paper that shook philosophy, with lessons for software engineers as a story · 566 points
HN discussionI found this page of undocumented HN tips [1], finds Hacker News Classic [2] and the top post there was Hacker News Classics [3]. [1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/classic [3] http://jsomers.net/hn/ Quite a cool coincidence!
Comment linking /hn/
on “Show HN: Hacker News Classics”Submitted The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis as a story · 511 points
HN discussionYou could render the http://jsomers.net/hn/stories.json some other way, or examine the javascript yourself, as it is not obfuscated or anything
Comment linking /hn/stories.json
on “Show HN: Hacker News Classics”- zt · 2019-08-05
Submitted Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) as a story · 453 points
HN discussion HN it may have pretentious articles, the comments are the most substantial. Lately I've been lurking through HN Classics (1) (Many research papers and pdfs posted on HN that are old) and the comments are the best part of them. (1) http://jsomers.net/hn/
Comment linking /hn/
on “Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People”Submitted The baffling intelligence of a single cell (2024) as a story · 420 points
HN discussion> In other words, we only hear and watch stories from those people who chose storytelling as their career, and if you assume we are inevitably influenced by their views then we're effectively taking advice from them. This means entertainment shapes the viewer-listener's interpretation of reality to better fit the model of reality to which storytellers subscribe, but I'm pretty sure that's not a desirable outcome in…
Comment linking /DFW_TV.pdf
on “Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People”Submitted Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems as a story · 348 points
HN discussionIt's actually an essay of his: "Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Careenium" [1] discussing a marble-based conciousness (with the marbles 'careening' around the 'cranium' generating the awful pun...) [1] https://jsomers.net/careenium.pdf
Comment linking /careenium.pdf
on “4-bit calculator made from cardboard and marbles”Submitted Hacker News Classics (2018) as a story · 311 points
HN discussionFew ideas: * this one from Paul Graham: you retain more from reading than you think you do http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html * this one from James Somers: actively engage (don't read without a pen and paper, explain stuff to yourself as you go) http://jsomers.net/blog/kenjitsu To my mind, 'what' trumps 'how'. A casual reading of 'Mrs. Dalloway' brings a greater reward than n airport non-fictions.
Comment linking /blog/kenjitsu
on “Ask HN: How Do You Read?”Submitted Gettiers in software engineering (2019) as a story · 303 points
HN discussion"Show HN: Hacker News Classics" might fit the bill. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442888 App: http://jsomers.net/hn/ Source: https://github.com/jsomers/hacker-classics
Comment linking /hn/
on “Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt (2014)”Submitted You’re probably using the wrong dictionary (2014) as a story · 291 points
HN discussionConsider this very popular hn link: http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary it gets posted once a year at least and strongly recommends looking up words you already know.
Comment linking /blog/dictionary
on “Why I built a dictionary app”Submitted Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) as a story · 268 points
HN discussionThis looks great, congratulations to the author. I will be using it. In case you’ve never read it, this 2014 blog post is an all time favourite of mine. It really opened up my thinking about words and definitions: You’re probably using the wrong dictionary - http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary Ever since reading that, I have tended to use the 1913 Webster’s as my primary dictionary, supplemented by various modern one…
Comment linking /blog/dictionary
on “Why I built a dictionary app”Submitted “It turns out” as a story · 257 points
HN discussion
