Top all-time · #2034
Sam Bleckley
Personal blog · sambleckley.com/writing · on HN as diiqdesignaiculture
Sam Bleckley's personal blog at sambleckley.com covers design, ai and culture. Since 2019, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 49 times, most often “The Church of Interruption”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-02-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Sam Bleckley's writing mostly for 'The Church of Interruption', an essay on conversation styles where some people interrupt and others wait. It is cited in many HN threads on interruption.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
My name is Sam Bleckley. I’m a consulting software engineer, designer, and artist working out of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Most-linked posts?
- The Church of Interruption21 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2019-07-17
- Lab Notebooks (2020)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-08-04
- On Trouser Pockets2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-18
What Hacker News says?
I enjoyed his art greatly: https://sambleckley.com/art/
Comment linking /art/
on “On Trouser Pockets”Submitted On Trouser Pockets as a story · 769 points
HN discussionWrong. TL;DR: https://sambleckley.com/assets/images/pants2.jpg
Comment linking /assets/images/pants2.jpg
on “On Trouser Pockets”Submitted The Church of Interruption as a story · 399 points
HN discussionTL;DR: https://sambleckley.com/assets/images/pants1.jpg
Comment linking /assets/images/pants1.jpg
on “On Trouser Pockets”Submitted The Church of Interruption (2018) as a story · 250 points
HN discussionI take it you are not a member of the Church of Interruption[0] then. https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html
Comment linking /writing/church-of-interruption.html
on “Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)”Submitted Worrying about the NPM Ecosystem as a story · 174 points
HN discussionThis article reminds me of "The Church of Interruption", the best short article I ever read about communication styles: https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html
Comment linking /writing/church-of-interruption.html
on “Good conversations have lots of doorknobs”Submitted Lab Notebooks (2020) as a story · 148 points
HN discussionThe demo reminded me of this amazing post: https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html
Comment linking /writing/church-of-interruption.html
on “Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency”Submitted Don't Fire Your Illustrator as a story · 66 points
HN discussionhttps://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html Tl;dr: they aren't all being rude, sometimes it's just different styles of communication and sometimes they're compatible, and sometimes not so much. (And sometimes they are being rude, and sometimes they maybe can't help it...)
Comment linking /writing/church-of-interruption.html
on “I love you, Hacker News, but you’re toxic”Submitted The Church of Interruption (2011) as a story · 7 points
HN discussionAbsolutely, extensive notes are a huge part of my practice both on teams and solo [1] -- I'm trying to say "solve the problems you actually have" not "when solo, cowboy-code everything like a madman". [1] https://sambleckley.com/writing/lab-notebooks.html
Comment linking /writing/lab-notebooks.html
on “Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?”Submitted One Song in Your Musical Is Wrong as a story · 2 points
HN discussionDeborah Tannen talks about this type of thing in her book 'You Just Don't Understand'. There's a whole chapter about interrupting. There is a difference between overlapping and trying to dominate and it talks about successful and unsuccessful 'co-operative overlapping'. It talks about culture too. Also this article: https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html
Comment linking /writing/church-of-interruption.html
on “Wait vs. Interrupt Culture”Submitted Contributing in Absentia as a story · 2 points
HN discussionRelated - The Church of Interruption [1]. > When people are interrupting each other - when they're constantly tugging the conversation back and forth between their preferred directions - then the conversation itself is just a battle of wills. But when people just put in one thing at a time, and trust their fellows to only say things that relate to the thing that came right before - at least, until there's a very lon…
Comment linking /writing/church-of-interruption.html
on “Wait vs. Interrupt Culture”Submitted The Church of Interruption – Sam Bleckley as a story · 2 points
HN discussionyour comment and its parent reminded me of this: https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html
Comment linking /writing/church-of-interruption.html
on “Ask HN: What are some available force multipliers that most people don't know?”Submitted Maestro Syndrome as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://sambleckley.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are the best-designed personal blogs you’ve come across?”Submitted Lab Notebooks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAuthor here! As noted in another reply, I'm using a custom justification tool I built almost a decade ago called unjustifiable. The way it goes about it very silly; you can read more about it at https://sambleckley.com/writing/text-justification.html
Comment linking /writing/text-justification.html
on “Don't Fire Your Illustrator”Submitted On Seeming Simple as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWell put. Big fan of the "Commercial illustrators will keep their jobs, but will mostly need to learn to use AI as a part of their workflow to maintain a higher pace of work" part. I'm a sometimes-illustrator (but my style is pretty far from what Generative AI is doing), and I recently published a 1.1 of a game manual which uses Midjourney images. I'm currently investing in a "proper" illustrator because the MDJ ima…
Comment linking /writing/civitai.com/images
on “Don't Fire Your Illustrator”Submitted The Inefficient Courtroom as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSounds like you're a church of interruption person. Whereas this advice is about teaching women to go from meek to church of strong civility. https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html
Comment linking /writing/church-of-interruption.html
on “How to Navigate Being the Only Woman on Your Team”Submitted I Rewrote a Century-Old Artist's Anatomy Book as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
