Top all-time · #25
Tim Urban
Personal blog · waitbutwhy.comproductivityphilosophywriting
Tim Urban writes Wait But Why, a personal blog at waitbutwhy.com about productivity, philosophy and writing. Since 2013, 802 different Hacker News readers have linked it 1,126 times, most often “Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 23 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Tim Urban's long essays on Elon Musk and SpaceX, procrastination and AI as the way into those topics. Comments call the blog fantastic and urge readers to start with them.
- Recommended for · 23 comments
- Comments call it fantastic and a great read, and praise its procrastination, Musk and AI posts as incredibly compelling.
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.
A popular long-form, stick-figure-illustrated blog about almost everything.
Most-linked posts?
- Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future46 people · 53 mentions · first linked 2017-07-05
- The Tail End (2015)45 people · 50 mentions · first linked 2017-07-23
- Your Life in Weeks – Wait but Why45 people · 48 mentions · first linked 2017-08-22
- The Road to Superintelligence (2015)42 people · 50 mentions · first linked 2017-07-25
- The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence40 people · 41 mentions · first linked 2015-01-22
- The Fermi Paradox31 people · 32 mentions · first linked 2014-05-22
- Why Procrastinators Procrastinate (2013)28 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2017-07-31
- Why Procrastinators Procrastinate25 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2014-01-07
- What’s our Problem? A (Wait but Why?) self-help book for societies23 people · 23 mentions · first linked 2017-11-05
- The Fermi Paradox (2014)22 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2017-10-20
What Hacker News says?
> about...2,000 Saturn V rockets Or about 670 BFRs [1]. It would take 6 cycles of tripling size and/or performance to get a single system with enough thrust to meet your 7/42 year schedule. The Saturn V first flew in 1967 [1]; SpaceX plans to launch its Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) in 2022 or 2024 [2]. That's an expected 60 years to triple performance. [1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-roc…
Comment linking /2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story.html
on “Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth”Submitted How to Pick Your Life Partner (2014) as a story · 362 points
HN discussionIf you are interested there is an article series on Wait but Why here: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-m... about Elon Musk and his goals with SpaceX (and much more).
Comment linking /2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html
on “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]”Submitted If Andromeda Were Brighter, This is What You’d See (2014) as a story · 272 points
HN discussionhttps://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html
Comment linking /2020/01/sick-giant.html
on “U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests”Submitted The Fermi Paradox as a story · 223 points
HN discussionA long, but interesting, take on the issue. Apparently on its way as a book soon https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html
Comment linking /2020/01/sick-giant.html
on “U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests”Submitted A Sick Giant as a story · 220 points
HN discussionIt's a misquote from the Elon Musk Wait But Why article: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-m... "the four entities in history who have managed to launch a spacecraft into orbit and successfully return it to Earth are the US, Russia, China—and SpaceX"
Comment linking /2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html
on “Master Plan, Part Deux”Submitted Everything You Should Know About Sound (2016) as a story · 171 points
HN discussionA link for the lazy, the first part of the Elon Musk series on Wait But Why: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-m...
Comment linking /2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html
on “Master Plan, Part Deux”Submitted It's Going to Be Okay as a story · 138 points
HN discussionbrain-computer interface This one actually is being worked on, and it's a very hard problem. Great high level article of where we're at https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
Comment linking /2017/04/neuralink.html
on “It’s Time to Build”Submitted All my thoughts after 40 hours in the Vision Pro as a story · 135 points
HN discussionFeels like higher mind vs primitive mind https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/fire-light.html Loong but great read
Comment linking /2019/08/fire-light.html
on “Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it”Submitted Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future as a story · 133 points
HN discussionIf you found the advice valuable, you may also like the two part series [0,1] on procrastination from waitbutwhy. The value there is the detailed analysis of the "just starting" part, why it is hard and how to still do it. [0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti... [1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat-procrastination.h...
Comment linking /2013/11/how-to-beat-procrastination.html
on “Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it”Submitted How to Name a Baby (2013) as a story · 113 points
HN discussionI always think of this piece: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/doing-a-ted-talk-the-full-sto... The best presenters are those who have the natural affinity (or enough practice) to do method 2 really well. What we get from Apple (and most other professional-level speakers who aren't willing to take risks) is method 3C.
Comment linking /2016/03/doing-a-ted-talk-the-full-story.html
on “iPhone Duo”Submitted The Procrastination Matrix (2015) as a story · 97 points
HN discussionI'm a 40 year old engineer. The big events in my life from a technology perspective so far have been: 1989: Coding for the first time (Apple IIe) 1994: Getting on the Internet 1999: Using Google when it started to get really good 2005: Buying GOOG Stock 2014: Buying Tesla Stock 2022: Building a local Pipeline with GANs, SD, Nvidia 1660 Things are about to go nuts. Tim Urban explains it well. https://waitbutwhy.com/2…
Comment linking /2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
on “4.2 Gigabytes, Or: How to Draw Anything”Submitted The American Brain as a story · 93 points
HN discussionhttps://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti... WaitButWhy blog gave me an amazing insight into why do we procrastinate in the most simplest form. I've felt like, I was literally reading about me
Comment linking /2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html
on “Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time”Submitted The Marriage Decision: Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again (2016) as a story · 74 points
HN discussionYou might find this interesting reading. Long article but a pretty easy read. http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story... Follow this with an interview with Reza Aslan on CNN which the anchors fail repeatedly at trying to digest things down to a soundbite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzusSqcotDw
Comment linking /2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html
on “VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks”Submitted The Road to Superintelligence (2015) as a story · 65 points
HN discussionThis one is long but I recommend trying to finish it. If it resonates at all you'll probably get sucked in to it before the halfway point. (The whole blog is fantastic) https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html
Comment linking /2018/04/picking-career.html
on “Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?”Submitted The Tail End (2015) as a story · 64 points
HN discussionWhat about both..? For example, I have a concept in my head that's like a hashtag but would translate to "over-optimized 80s/90s technologies that have aged poorly". It's a categorization that overlaps with a sense of frustration (typically because I'm using one) and joy that I'm seeing fewer of them these days... I have a lot of similar "feelings" that are felt instantly, but would take dense English to express. It…
Comment linking /2016/05/clueyness-a-weird-kind-of-sad.html
on “Not everyone has an internal monologue”Submitted What If All 7.1 Billion People Moved To Tunisia? as a story · 63 points
HN discussion
