Top all-time · #34
Maciej Cegłowski
Personal blog · idlewords.com · on HN as idlewordsculturewriting
Maciej Cegłowski writes Idle Words, a personal blog at idlewords.com about culture and writing. Since 2007, 679 different Hacker News readers have linked it 1,106 times, most often “The Website Obesity Crisis”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly link Maciej Cegłowski's blog for its essays on website bloat, especially the 'Website Obesity Crisis' talk. Commenters also call some of his posts very well written, a modern classic, or a favourite.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Called 'very well written', a 'modern classic', an 'excellent translation' of a slideshow, and a 'favourite essay'.
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.
Most-linked posts?
- The Website Obesity Crisis52 people · 62 mentions · first linked 2016-01-01
- The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel (2007)44 people · 52 mentions · first linked 2019-02-11
- The website obesity crisis (2015)43 people · 64 mentions · first linked 2019-01-07
- Dabblers and Blowhards36 people · 46 mentions · first linked 2018-12-21
- "Dabblers and Blowhards" - hackers are nothing like painters [2005]33 people · 39 mentions · first linked 2008-07-07
- The Cure for Scurvy, Forgotten32 people · 33 mentions · first linked 2019-05-28
- Scott and Scurvy: How the cure for scurvy was lost26 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2010-03-08
- Superintelligence25 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2018-12-07
- Web Design: The First 100 Years (2014)22 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2015-07-21
- Web Design: The First 100 Years (2014)14 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2018-12-27
What Hacker News says?
I didn't think I'd say it, but after reading @Pinboard's history of a space shuttle, I'm glad we're moving past politicized too big to fail projects. http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm
Comment linking /2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm
on “SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches”Submitted The Website Obesity Crisis as a story · 1122 points
HN discussionIt's hard to tell whether you're being serious.... A single tweet is so incredibly bloated and inefficient for transmission through space, that it would not have any chance of arriving uncorrupted on the other side. "If you open that tweet in a browser, you'll see the page is 900 KB big. That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s funny and enigmatic novel about the Devil vis…
Comment linking /talks/website_obesity.htm
on “Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources”Submitted Web Design: The First 100 Years (2014) as a story · 988 points
HN discussionPlate of Shrimp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537629 https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm >I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has rec…
Comment linking /2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
on “Meta lays off 11,000 people”- pw · 2016-12-22
Submitted Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People as a story · 883 points
HN discussion I cannot help but view every single thing involving humans through this lens. Humans physically cannot choose to ignore emotion and think or communicate "rationally". That's why people who think they're "logical" have no immunity from motivated reasoning, and "rationalist" can turn so toxic and so divorced from reality. That's why some of the most "logical", mathematically intelligent people are so susceptible to re…
Comment linking /talks/superintelligence.htm
on “Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?”Submitted What Happens Next Will Amaze You as a story · 753 points
HN discussion"Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment." Feels similar to a point in a larger rant about bloated page sizes: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm "I think we need to ban third-party tracking, and third…
Comment linking /talks/website_obesity.htm
on “What if we made advertising illegal?”Submitted A Walk in Hong Kong as a story · 748 points
HN discussionMaciej Cegłowski is a generally clever and entertaining guy. Check out his (mostly unrelated) blog too... it's very well written. https://idlewords.com/
Comment linking /
on “Del.icio.us”Submitted The Lunacy of Artemis as a story · 723 points
HN discussionLovely! Definitely like the style here and the focus on content first. Like other people have said it's similar to Motherfucking Website[1], and a Better Motherfucking Website[2]. I'll need to start including this when I link to those two. For my website[3] I'm really trying to keep weight on the wire down too so I am opting to skip the custom font and header image. It's quite nice to have 10-15kb pages in the age o…
Comment linking /talks/website_obesity.htm
on “Show HN: Web Design in 4 minutes”Submitted Who Will Command the Robot Armies? as a story · 673 points
HN discussionAh yes, AGI: The idea that eats smart people. https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm
Comment linking /talks/superintelligence.htm
on “John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence”Submitted Legends of the Ancient Web (2017) as a story · 567 points
HN discussionNo, of course not. I just try to write code in a performant way the first time around[0] - it's usually more than enough. The problem here is lack of effective feedback on the market. You may be writing your application totally bloated, and due to the nature of software, you might not notice any significant impact on your business. It turns out that your application may be lagging just enough to make it unusable for…
Comment linking /talks/website_obesity.htm
on “Show HN: Airmash – Multiplayer Missile Warfare HTML5 Game”Submitted Deep-Fried Data as a story · 560 points
HN discussionHaha. This term is quite old actually. http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Comment linking /talks/website_obesity.htm
on “Show HN: Airmash – Multiplayer Missile Warfare HTML5 Game”Submitted The Advertising Bubble as a story · 551 points
HN discussionYou're not wrong, but the article the author linked to[1] specifically deals with the problem of modern web page size bloat (which is why it feels out of place to the rest of the article, IMO.) [1] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Comment linking /talks/website_obesity.htm
on “Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)”Submitted Why Arabic is Terrific as a story · 504 points
HN discussionMaciej Ceglowski wrote about McMurdo: http://idlewords.com/2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm
Comment linking /2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm
on “Two Photographers Unknowingly Shot the Same Millisecond in Time”Submitted Anatomy of a Moral Panic as a story · 491 points
HN discussionWeb 2.0/3.0 was a mistake. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Comment linking /talks/website_obesity.htm
on “Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project”Submitted Why Arabic Is Terrific (2011) as a story · 346 points
HN discussionhttps://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushin... http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://david.woodhou.se/email.html
Comment linking /talks/website_obesity.htm
on “Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web”- pw · 2019-05-28
Submitted What I Learned Trying to Secure Congressional Campaigns as a story · 345 points
HN discussion See also: The Website Obesity Crisis[0] by Maciej Ceglowski [0] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Comment linking /talks/website_obesity.htm
on “The web sucks if you have a slow connection”Submitted The Internet With A Human Face as a story · 315 points
HN discussion
