Top all-time · #5504
Jason Lefkowitz
Personal blog · jasonlefkowitz.net · on HN as smacktowardwritingculture
Jason Lefkowitz writes Just Well Mixed, a personal blog at jasonlefkowitz.net about writing and culture. Since 2011, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 290 times, most often “People Met in Hotel Lobbies (2017)”. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for opinion essays on tech and business topics, such as a critique of Bill Nye's anti-creationist argument, WeWork, and Heartbleed. Commenters mostly cite his posts as support for their own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Hi there. I’m Jason Lefkowitz. If you’re reading this you likely want to know something more about me, so here you go. I’m the founder of Rogue Repairman Productions, a software development consultancy in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We make technology suck less for the people who use it. If you’re
Most-linked posts?
- People Met in Hotel Lobbies (2017)2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-05-24
- Choreographing Armageddon in “Bravo Romeo Delta” (2014)2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-09-23
- John Boyd and the four qualities of victorious organizations2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-11-04
- The Free Coffee Test, or Lefkowitz’s Law of Corporate Financial Health (2013)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-11-16
- Google and Paint.NET need to stop misleading users (2013)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-05-14
- Choreographing Armageddon in “Bravo Romeo Delta”2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-11-11
- Bill Nye demonstrates how not to persuade a creationist (2012)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-09-25
- Against line-chart liberalism (2014)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-07-23
- Twitter teaches a new generation of developers why proprietary platforms suck2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-08-17
- What it is like to live with clinical depression2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-10-21
What Hacker News says?
I made a chart a few years ago using data from Apple's annual reports that should explain sufficiently why this is the case: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/apple-...
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2016/10/apple-net-sales.png
on “If a MacBook Pro runs hot or shows high kernel CPU, try charging it on the right”Submitted People Met in Hotel Lobbies (2017) as a story · 321 points
HN discussionI don't think I could disagree more. See, eg: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear... (And this comment in particular: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear... ) Or: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-09/why-getti... Or especially: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/05/introducing-lefkowitzs-la... Nice chairs and free snacks are a trivial expense, and are very…
Comment linking /2013/05/introducing-lefkowitzs-law-of-corporate-financial-health/
on “WeWork sells Meetup”Submitted Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser as a story · 252 points
HN discussionThe Web belongs to all of us because the people who invented it made the incredibly generous decision to set it free. (I've written a little about how that decision was made here: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/05/the-act-of-generosity-that... ) I don't see anybody rushing to put their VR IP into the public domain.
Comment linking /2013/05/the-act-of-generosity-that-changed-the-world/
on “Virtual Reality is going to change the world”Submitted Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser as a story · 198 points
HN discussionOut of curiosity I poked around on your site and did some test searches using words similar but not identical to some of your titles. I did this just on articles I thought people might actually be looking for and that are over 1500 words. For example: heartbleed bug what you need to know Your post ( http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2014/04/the-heartbleed-bug-what-no... ) was buried. I gave up looking for it after the first…
Comment linking /2014/04/the-heartbleed-bug-what-non-nerds-need-to-know/
on “Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure”Submitted Google and Paint.NET need to stop misleading users (2013) as a story · 178 points
HN discussionThere's usually signs, if you're sufficiently attuned to see them. Another thread on HN a few days back led me to write a blog post about one reliable type of "warm up the résumé" indicator: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/05/introducing-lefkowitzs-law...
Comment linking /2013/05/introducing-lefkowitzs-law-of-corporate-financial-health/
on “Zynga to Lay Off 520 Employees and shutter NY and LA Offices”Submitted Why airplane windows have round corners (2016) as a story · 133 points
HN discussionIf you want a more detailed critique of Twitter's design and the effect it has on conversations there, I wrote one last year: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/ /end self-promotion
Comment linking /2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/
on “I Hope Twitter Goes Away”Submitted “Rule the Waves”: a game of naval strategy (2016) as a story · 113 points
HN discussionI wonder if this piece I wrote on one way for organizations to succeed without bureaucracy or heavy top-down management might not be of interest to those suffering from the "fail fast" syndrome: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/03/how-winners-win-john-boyd-... Not to say it's the only way to do things, of course, but it's a hell of a lot better than "Get Shit Done" ... EDIT: Submitted the post to HN for discussion: ht…
Comment linking /2013/03/how-winners-win-john-boyd-and-the-four-qualities-of-victorious-organizations/
on “Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture”Submitted There is no good reason to buy an inkjet printer (2016) as a story · 90 points
HN discussionI wrote a whole thing about this: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/05/introducing-lefkowitzs-la... What it boils down to is that the penny-pinching stuff is the stuff that's least painful for managers to cut. Firing people sucks, selling big things like buildings is hard and takes a long time. Whereas cutting off the free soda is something the manager can do right now , without having to pick a fight with other manag…
Comment linking /2013/05/introducing-lefkowitzs-law-of-corporate-financial-health/
on “The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced”Submitted Against live-tweeting at conferences as a story · 74 points
HN discussionI made a version of this argument three years ago here: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/ Twitter's core problem is that its product's design encourages users to behave badly. Mechanisms are baked deeply into it that make it very difficult for its users to come across as anything other than jerks. Even those with the best of intentions fall afoul of these mechanisms by accident periodically,…
Comment linking /2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/
on “Twitter's Fucked”Submitted Windows Live is dead as a story · 69 points
HN discussionYes, me too. "Access journalism" has always seemed like a dead-end to me anyway, as it gives the subject a powerful veto on stories they don't like simply by threatening to limit or remove the access. Access feels like privilege, but in reality it's just a gilded cage. (I wrote a whole thing on this subject, a couple of years back: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/01/rick-reillys-lance-armstr... ) Of course we'll see…
Comment linking /2013/01/rick-reillys-lance-armstrong-problem-is-all-of-journalisms-problem/
on “Reuters' position on covering Trump”Submitted Playing Machiavelli in the Middle East with “Conflict” (2014) as a story · 67 points
HN discussionI wrote a whole thing making that very argument: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/
Comment linking /2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/
on “How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t”Submitted John Boyd and the four qualities of victorious organizations as a story · 67 points
HN discussionIf you're looking for realism in your apocalyptic nightmare scenarios, there's an ooooold DOS game called Bravo Romeo Delta you should track down. I wrote a little bit about it here: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2014/11/choreographing-armageddon-... It's fallen into abandonware hell, so you can't buy a copy at GOG or anything like that, but cough I'm sure you could find a copy if you looked on the right sites.
Comment linking /2014/11/choreographing-armageddon-bravo-romeo-delta/
on “JavaScript Cold War simulation”Submitted The Free Coffee Test, or Lefkowitz’s Law of Corporate Financial Health (2013) as a story · 60 points
HN discussionI made another chart back in 2016 to show how over a decade the iPhone became such a truly once-in-a-lifetime product: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/apple-... (As an illustration for this post: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/why-apple-doesnt-care-abo... ) By 2009 Apple's iPhone business was larger than its personal computer business. By 2011 it was larger than all of Apple's other busines…
Comment linking /2016/10/why-apple-doesnt-care-about-professional-mac-users-anymore/
on “Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment”Submitted Stephen Douglas, the politician who was too smart for his own good as a story · 50 points
HN discussionThere's also the problem that adding the annotation layer on top of the original article can impact performance. I've seen some examples of people using Genius annotation in exactly the segment you mention (political/journalistic), and in every case the annotated version was slow to load and sluggish to browse through. It got to the point where seeing the mention of annotation was enough to kill my interest in click…
Comment linking /2006/12/third_voice_wro/
on “Genius laid off a bunch of its engineers”Submitted Why Apple doesn’t care about professional Mac users anymore (2016) as a story · 46 points
HN discussionI actually got approached myself to write something like this recently. I blog occasionally about defense issues. I got a call out of the blue from someone who said they liked something I'd written about the F-35 (this: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/08/stovl-the-f-35-and-how-we... ), and would I be interested in getting paid to write an op-ed about the current state of the F-35 program? I'm always interested in ge…
Comment linking /2013/08/stovl-the-f-35-and-how-were-even-more-fed-than-david-axe-suggests/
on “A shadowy op-ed campaign is now smearing SpaceX in space cities”Submitted A Well-Regulated Apocalypse: The Code of Emergency Federal Regulations (2016) as a story · 27 points
HN discussion
