Top all-time · #8897
Jed Hartman
Personal blog · kith.org/jedculturewritingcareer
Jed Hartman writes Lorem Ipsum, a personal blog at kith.org about culture, writing and career. Since 2008, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Why I've now quit my Google contract job”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Jed Hartman's kith.org pages on language and words (amber, grammatical petrels, conjoined word order), puzzles, a 2007 journal entry on starting a webapp, and a list of linguistics papers.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why I've now quit my Google contract job2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-11
What Hacker News says?
Amber, the color of traffic lights, waves of grain and... pretty much nothing else. Reminds me of (grammatical) petrels: https://www.kith.org/words/lists/petrels-list/ It's as if when modifiers and nouns sense they are dying in a language, they clutch on to one another for support, and eventually become like a single unit.
Comment linking /words/lists/petrels-list/
on “The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?”Submitted Why I've now quit my Google contract job as a story · 26 points
HN discussionTrue enough! Is it complex numbers you're considering? Now I feel like I'm playing one of those puzzles where there is puddle of water and a dead man and you're supposed to figure out what happened. edit: Puzzles like this: http://kith.org/logos/things/sitpuz/situations.html
Comment linking /logos/things/sitpuz/situations.html
on “An Interview Question Too Many Developers Get Wrong”Submitted Jed's List of Situation Puzzles as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThere is a new phrasal verb “be a thing” which lets us conveniently talk about such constructions. That is, “now and then” is a thing—an idiom, with a specific meaning outside the wording—but “then and now” is not a thing. You will note that all of the semantic constraints they propose place the item with a “positive” aspect first—I wrote a blog post about this[1]. There is also a related notion of “stormy petrel”[2…
Comment linking /logos/words/lower/petrels.html
on “Ordering of conjoined elements in English (1975) [pdf]”Submitted Jed's List of Situation Puzzles as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMake sure you read this first: http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2007/10/27/10686.html
Comment linking /journals/jed/2007/10/27/10686.html
on “Ask HN: I want to make a webapp. Where do I start?”Submitted Why I've now quit my Google contract job as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://www.kith.org/words/2022/06/11/best-linguistics-paper...
Comment linking /words/2022/06/11/best-linguistics-paper-ever-the-perception-of-rhythm-in-language/
on “Ask HN: What are the best papers you read in your life?”