Top all-time · #2321
Mike Caulfield
Personal blog · hapgood.uspoliticsculture
Mike Caulfield writes Hapgood, a personal blog at hapgood.us about politics and culture. Since 2013, 33 different Hacker News readers have linked it 57 times, most often “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Hapgood, Mike Caulfield's blog, mainly for 'The Garden and the Stream' essay on organising knowledge versus fleeting streams of posts, plus related ideas on library-style work and federated wikis.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Mike Caulfield's latest web incarnation. Networked Learning, Open Education, and Online Digital Literacy
Most-linked posts?
- The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral10 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2017-07-17
- Federated Education: New Directions in Digital Collaboration3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-11-07
- There’s a simple alternative to the current web2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-08-23
- We Should Put Fact-Checking Tools in the Core Browser2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-04-21
- Links as originally imagined were a separate layer of annotation on documents2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-07-22
What Hacker News says?
Inevitable of not, this has real costs, in that that government will eventually turn off the gravy train and the "good" and "bad" research alike will be negatively impacted. In other words, academia is sowing the seeds of its own demise, and with it, the official institutional pinnacle of our culture [please don't wince too hard when reading that!]. ---- The solution i think is less research but more library work. S…
Comment linking /2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
on “Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring”Submitted There’s a simple alternative to the current web as a story · 150 points
HN discussionhttps://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te...
Comment linking /2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
on “BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogs”Submitted Links as originally imagined were a separate layer of annotation on documents as a story · 111 points
HN discussion> "single social media personalities" routinely beat major news media organizations in being correct Citation? > and this happens frequently enough that lots of people have noticed Now we are getting back into "feelings" about what is true or not, or more plainly "this is what I want to hear" vs. "this is was is factually accurate". I am confident individual social media accounts become better confirmation bias mach…
Comment linking /2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/
on “The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation”Submitted The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral as a story · 43 points
HN discussionFirst https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/ , now this? I am very excited to see this sort of "codification" work become a legitimate academic enterprise. People I tend to trust are in that Frege > Russel camp, but that certainly doesn't make me less enthusiastic to see this sort of work undertaken. I am a big fan or the sort of thinking in https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te... and https://blo…
Comment linking /2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
on “Whitehead and Russell’s Principia rewritten in Coq”Submitted Trump University’s Online Materials Are a Lot Better Than Your University’s as a story · 32 points
HN discussionWell, there’s “right” in some abstract sense, and then there’s “right” as in most profitable. Building user-centered technologies is hard to make competitive with building corporate-centered technologies, especially once big money and bureaucracies have taken a field over from the dreamers and tinkerers and scientists. But yeah, Ted was right, as were Vannevar Bush and Doug Englebart before him, or Alan Kay after. S…
Comment linking /2015/07/21/beyond-conversation/
on “Decentralization for the web”Submitted Federated Education: New Directions in Digital Collaboration as a story · 29 points
HN discussionThis is the (admittedly somewhat long) transcription of a talk I use to introduce people to the idea: http://hapgood.us/2014/11/06/federated-education-new-directi... The elevator pitch for tech-minded people is that wikis are to SVN as federated wikis are to git. Instead of a shared wiki that people modify, each user has their own wiki which consists of both pages they've made or forked, so information propagates ba…
Comment linking /2014/11/06/federated-education-new-directions-in-digital-collaboration/
on “A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application”Submitted QAnon and Pinterest Is Just the Beginning as a story · 27 points
HN discussionI took note of that part too, it reminds me of this article [1] posted on HN recently. It contrasts the fleeting and context dependent flows of posts on social media ("the stream") with enduring wiki style interlinking of posts where the context is embedded in the linking ("the garden"). It consider it in the context of personal note taking, and I feel what you mention is the garden approach to conversation, as oppo…
Comment linking /2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
on “Unker Non-Linear Writing System”Submitted Control-F and Building Resilient Information Networks as a story · 25 points
HN discussionStill in the mold of https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te... , we have accrued tons of "library debt" as we research more things but don't spend commensurately more effort organizing what we've learned. I would not be surprised if this was a huge contributor to the decreasing cost effectiveness of science.
Comment linking /2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
on “Charles Darwin’s hunch about early life was probably right”Submitted The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral (2015) as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI cannot dispute the fact that the web is fantastic in many ways, and I did not intend to do so. Nevertheless, the current incarnation of the web is not the full system envisioned by Nelson and even TimBL. I chose the excerpt from that full quote poorly. I'll try again, but I'd recommend reading the full linked quote (or watching the original source video). > The "World Wide Web" program, the original browser/editor…
Comment linking /2014/08/14/the-web-is-broken-and-we-should-fix-it/
on “50 years ago today the word “hypertext” was introduced”Submitted The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI think the a good place to get a sense of the motivation is https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/the-holy-tr... / https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/computational+trinitarianism Let me break it down even more basically: 1. There's a sense in many corners academia that there's too much new but ephemeral work, and not enough librarian work codifying and polishing existing ideas for more better presentatinon. (…
Comment linking /2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
on “Homotopy Type Theory (2012) [pdf]”Submitted Berners-Lee Got Knocked Down to a Poster Session (2015) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYes, "computers that do the stuff", and "communication method that can be verified up to self-consistency" are best not conflated. I like thinking about https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te... and https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/ Historically, desk jobs meant producing and computing streams of documents, and the integration was mostly informal, in our heads. Now, we can collaborate directly…
Comment linking /2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
on “The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions”Submitted Information Underload as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI feel like with 2 fields medalists on boards, the culture can finally shift. I'm really excited. [It's not just about math, see https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te... for a great explanation of the type of labor that is mathlib is sorely lacking in just about every sector. I'm really hoping that mathematics can lead the way here.]
Comment linking /2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
on “A mathematical formalisation challenge by Peter Scholze”Submitted Why Facebook Won, and Other Hard Truths as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnalogous terminology for Stock and Flow are the Garden and Stream metaphors explored in Mike Caulfield's _The Garden and The Stream: A Technopastoral_. https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te...
Comment linking /2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
on “Stock and Flow (2010)”Submitted The Adult Education Market is Imploding as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI don't use this, but I think you might find this very interesting because you were talking about starting a blog on organizing information http://zettelkasten.de/book/de (click around to whatever you might find interesting, most of the site is in English.) It's basically exactly that, a blog on organizing information. Also make sure to check out the garden and the stream https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and…
Comment linking /2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
on “Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?”Submitted The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral (2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral (2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fyre Festival and the Trumpet of Amplification as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
