Top all-time · #8357
Scott B. Weingart
Personal blog · scottbot.net/HIALhistorydata
Scott B. Weingart's personal blog at scottbot.net covers history and data. Since 2012, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “The Route of a Text Message”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Scott Weingart's post on the route a text message takes through the network, and a related note on Asterisk's architecture, to explain how telephony and messaging systems work.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Historian of knowledge, professional circus performer, amateur father, and hopeless adventurer. Chief Technology Officer at the Library of Virginia and Resident scholar at Dartmouth College.
Most-linked posts?
- The Route of a Text Message3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-01-16
- Ghosts in the Machine: A Tour of the Shoah Foundation Digitization Facility2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-11-02
What Hacker News says?
I don't think I'm able to identify a blog post that truly had a major impact on my life, but the first thing that comes to mind was this really beautifully written piece about the life of a text message. Original: https://scottbot.net/the-route-of-a-text-message/ VICE article for prettier version: https://www.vice.com/en/article/kzdn8n/the-route-of-a-text-m...
Comment linking /the-route-of-a-text-message/
on “Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?”Submitted The Route of a Text Message as a story · 627 points
HN discussionI am hardly an expert myself but these two resources helped me build a bit of intuition: - The route of a text message: https://scottbot.net/the-route-of-a-text-message/ - Architecture of Asterisk - http://aosabook.org/en/asterisk.html
Comment linking /the-route-of-a-text-message/
on “Fonoster: The open-source alternative to Twilio”Submitted Don't calculate p-values without understanding them as a story · 74 points
HN discussionSubmitted Down the Rabbit Hole: on viral texts and linking to sources as a story · 60 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ghosts in the Machine: A Tour of the Shoah Foundation Digitization Facility as a story · 52 points
HN discussionSubmitted Demystifying Networks (Network Theory for the Digital Humanities) as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ghosts in the Machine: Materiality and Cost After a Tour of the Shoah Foundation as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Who sits in the 41st chair? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Seeking New Physics (2019) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion