Top all-time · #6680
Visakan Veerasamy
Personal blog · visakanv.com · on HN as visakanvculturephilosophywriting
Visakan Veerasamy writes @visakanv, a personal blog at visakanv.com about culture, philosophy and writing. Since 2013, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “How to build and maintain communities”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2024-11-17, 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 Visakan Veerasamy's blog for his writing on online communities and how they decline, and quote his point that a small share of members, 'assholes', damage groups.
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.
Most-linked posts?
- /blog/communities2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-01
- How to build and maintain communities2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-01-10
- The Problem of Excess Genius, by David Banks (1997)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-07-29
What Hacker News says?
> This is the inevitable fate of all communities. I've seen it happen so many times and I've seen so many discussions about it over and over again that I've begun to consolidate my thoughts and relevant links about it on this URL: http://visakanv.com/blog/communities And there just went an hour of my time :-) Good collection of posts.
Comment linking /blog/communities
on “AngelList acquires Product Hunt”Submitted Procrastination should be solved by lighting fires, not filling buckets as a story · 156 points
HN discussion> As an early fan of ProductHunt I became saddened to watch their community get diluted and become more of a place for "growth hackers" to hang out than people who actually make things. This is the inevitable fate of all communities. I've seen it happen so many times and I've seen so many discussions about it over and over again that I've begun to consolidate my thoughts and relevant links about it on this URL: http…
Comment linking /blog/communities
on “AngelList acquires Product Hunt”Submitted Bum-a-Cigarette App Idea. Thoughts? as a story · 9 points
HN discussionYes. My boss is one of them. Cal Newport writes quite a bit about doing deep work. [1] Tobias Lutke of Shopify seems to be another. [2] Most people are similar to how they were when they were in school, because most people don't deliberately put themselves in contexts in which they are forced to grow and develop. Discipline, in my opinion, is seldom something that you develop entirely for its own sake– rather, it te…
Comment linking /marketing/tobi
on “Screw motivation, what you need is discipline”Submitted The Problem of Excess Genius, by David Banks (1997) as a story · 5 points
HN discussion>So what is your writing process like? Thanks for asking! I have several different but interconnected processes: 1. I have a regular writing practice where I just open up something (Evernote, Byword, notepad, whatever) and start writing about whatever comes to mind. This is primarily just to develop the habit of writing. I mainly do this with my 1,000,000 word writing project [1]. 2. I do content marketing for work,…
Comment linking /1000/
on “Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident”Submitted Word Vomits (2012-2025) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA question I'm asking myself is: "What would it take for anarchism to work?" (See also: "What would it take for capitalism to work for everyone?") Some ideas to consider: 1. @visakanv on assholes: > Assholes make up about 1% of most groups, cause about 75% of the damage, and ruin everybody’s experience. [1] 2. Dale Pendell on a long-term formulation of anarchism he calls "Horizon Anarchism": > I want to see the pres…
Comment linking /blog/assholes/
on “Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)”Submitted Most People as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is surprisingly the case for lots of craftsmen in all fields. You may enjoy The Mundanity Of Excellence, by Daniel Chambliss, about how ordinary Olympic swimmers actually are. http://www.visakanv.com/blog/2014/01/the-mundanity-of-excell...
Comment linking /blog/2014/01/the-mundanity-of-excellence-by-daniel-chambliss/
on “How I Came to Write D”Submitted Twitter_RPG_strategy_guide.txt as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat's consistent with my experience as a musician. I'm no prodigy. I don't have a musican background. When I started out, I couldn't sing in tune and I couldn't clap in time. All I did was dick around on the guitar on and off for over a decade. I've gotten pretty good at it just by sucking at it for a long time, and reducing the suckage one little bit at a time. Professional musicians simply do the same thing, but…
Comment linking /blog/2014/01/the-mundanity-of-excellence-by-daniel-chambliss/
on “On Being Smart (2009) [pdf]”Submitted How to Ask for Help as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere's a writer from Esquire who's basically made a living doing experiments like this. He's written things like The Year Of Living Biblically [1] (self-explanatory), The Know-It-All (he read all of Encyclopedia Britannica) [2], and other experiments. There are a lot of others who have done similar things. Matt Cutts from Google does 30 day experiments. Karen X Cheng learned to dance in a year. There's something ab…
Comment linking /1000/
on “The Expert in a Year Challenge”Submitted Letter to a Young Songwriter as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI loved it so much that I once tried to do a 'modern update' of it, with headers and bullet points and so on. It's meant to be a supplement to the original essay, not a replacement: http://visakanv.com/blog/politics-and-the-english-language
Comment linking /blog/politics-and-the-english-language
on “I say, damn it, where are the beds? New books on Orwell”Submitted Lifelong procrastinator tracks productivity for 14 days. as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis was the quote that really resonated with me: "You know, it's funny. For all Feynman's independence, he was surprisingly diligent. I remember once he was preparing some fairly minor conference talk. He was quite concerned about it. I said, "You're a great speaker; what are you worrying about?" He said, "Yes, everyone thinks I'm a great speaker. So that means they expect more from me." It reminds me of Daniel Cha…
Comment linking /blog/2014/01/the-mundanity-of-excellence-by-daniel-chambliss/
on “A Short Talk about Richard Feynman (2005)”Submitted Pay It Forward (2020) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI'm a bit of a procrastination literature connoisseur. In addition to WBW, here are some of my favorites: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140121123613-25056271-tasks... http://lesswrong.com/lw/21b/ugh_fields/ http://visakanv.com/1000/0395-procrastination-as-parent-vs-c... (the most recent thing I've written) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY69bgftUok
Comment linking /1000/0395-procrastination-as-parent-vs-child-breakdown/
on “Good and Bad Procrastination (2005)”Submitted The Problem of Excess Genius (1997) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI seriously love Tiago's work. I don't know if anybody remembers, but I once wrote a post about procrastination that got to the frontpage of HN, a couple of years ago [1]. And since then, I've been basically reading everything relevant I've been able to get my hands on. (Here's a 'research review' of sorts: [2]). I'd put Tiago squarely in my top 3-5 list of 'People Who Get It'. I highly recommend reading the rest of…
Comment linking /1000/0333-procrastination-pt1/
on “To finish projects on time, start every single step as late as possible”Submitted Mario Castle Problems as a story · 1 points
HN discussionReminds me of Shopify's Tobias Lutke– also German, also took an off-beaten path. I transcribed a Keynote that tobi once did.[1] Let me dig up the relevant bit: > Within my little world, within this school, the most obvious/profound thought I had was that I needed Air Jordan sneakers to be part of the popular kids. > That seems really silly from the perspective of adults. I was lucky- I got out of school (you can lea…
Comment linking /marketing/tobi
on “Peter Thiel's Dropout Club”Submitted Being Smart vs Being Kind (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNice! While we're in the spirit of sharing aggregated material that we've found helpful, here's mine. Sorry for the messiness: http://visakanv.com/blog/recommendations
Comment linking /blog/recommendations
on “The Futility of Productivity Posts”Submitted The Library Ethos (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI've written a bunch of stuff about this, but yeah these past few posts/submissions make me realize that there would be utility in a centralized post. I think the closest thing I've written about this is "Letter To A Young Songwriter"– http://visakanv.com/1000/0152-letter-to-a-young-songwriter/
Comment linking /1000/0152-letter-to-a-young-songwriter/
on “Let's chat, HN: On "X makes you more creative"”Submitted The Library Ethos (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
