Top all-time · #6455
Zak Slayback
Personal blog · 1517.substack.com · on HN as areoformstartupsculture
Zak Slayback writes 1517 Fund, a personal blog at 1517.substack.com about startups and culture. Since 2022, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “Why Bell Labs Worked”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked posts cover Bell Labs' research culture and science reproducibility. The comments are a link-fix request, a complaint about a scraper copy, and a quote, with no judgement of the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Letters from the Edge of 1517.
Most-linked posts?
- Why Bell Labs Worked5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-05-11
- Artemis, Greatness, and Risk4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2026-04-04
- vs. Outside Context Problems. Or, why smart people make bad predictions2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-03-14
What Hacker News says?
Yes, and the memories of Apollo are made rosy by hagiography. I even wrote an entire thing to explain why, https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri... (yeah, shameless plug, sorry - it's more for the citations than not. You can read the standards and reports I've linked to) But if I'm allowed to repeat myself from elsewhere in the thread and the meat of the above thing, It's physically not possib…
Comment linking /p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-risk
on “Artemis II safely splashes down”Submitted Why Bell Labs Worked as a story · 336 points
HN discussionThat's physically not possible due to the distances and energies involved. Even with the Commercial Cargo and Crew Program (C3P), NASA has set the acceptable mortality threshold at 1 in 270 over the entire mission and 1 in 1000 on ascent / descent. If they could set it higher by gaming the math, they would. They can't. We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. And no, Apollo was…
Comment linking /p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-risk
on “Artemis II safely splashes down”Submitted Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies as a story · 283 points
HN discussionPlease fix the link: https://1517.substack.com/p/why-bell-labs-worked (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010 )
Comment linking /p/why-bell-labs-worked
on “Why Bell Labs Worked”Submitted Why Bell Labs Worked as a story · 87 points
HN discussionWhy share this bizarre scraper copy of the article and not the original one that gives traffic to the author? https://1517.substack.com/p/why-bell-labs-worked The original definitely didn't include lines like > Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Comment linking /p/why-bell-labs-worked
on “Why Bell Labs Worked”Submitted What I learned from trying to hang Socrates as a story · 71 points
HN discussionI wrote an article about nuclear armageddon under the guise of writing about game theory, and the truth is that it's extremely unlikely something will happen. Taking the liberty to quote myself, > However, the implications of MAD aren’t what most people expect. Our current interpretation is a mutation of the original premise, as von Neumann examined the situation mathematically and arrived at a two-party version of…
Comment linking /p/the-limits-of-game-theory
on “Ask HN: Why Hasn't the Doomsday Clock Advanced?”Submitted Powder and stone, or, why medieval rulers loved castles as a story · 57 points
HN discussionAh, this is the next part of my castle series! But essentially, gunpowder made castles obsolete. In 1450, when the English were driven out of France, the walls fell in hours. What was an essential cornerstone of military strategy and supply chains became obsolete overnight.† Star Forts were the answer. It's a simple bit of physics, as long as the force isn't head on i.e. along the normal and can be deflected (ideall…
Comment linking /p/powder-and-stone-or-why-medieval
on “Militarized snowflakes: The accidental beauty of Renaissance star forts”Submitted The Limits of Game Theory as a story · 9 points
HN discussionYes, and that's part of what spaceflight is. https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri... It has always been a touch-and-go affair
Comment linking /p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-risk
on “Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon”Submitted Artemis, Greatness, and Risk as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI think analyses like these are motivated reasoning. In 2000, I'm sure you could have said that after infrastructure costs the internet and the web added "basically zero" to US economic growth. And there were people saying that! Someone I deeply respect, Clifford Stollm wrote a book called “Silicon Snake Oil — Second thoughts on the information highway" in 1995. And while he was and is a brilliant person, Stoll was…
Comment linking /p/inside-v-outside-context-problems
on “AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says”Submitted 2E = Gummy Bears, Lockpicking and Aerospace with Teens as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today If I may be flippant, not to you but to the sentiment, skill issue. We're about to enter an era of climate instability that's going to cause wild fluctuations in the ability to grow food across the globe. Historical agriculture data AND data about confounds is crucial for figuring out what strains outside of our current mostly mono-s…
Comment linking /p/powder-and-stone-or-why-medieval
on “AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late”Submitted 1 in 30 – Artemis, Greatness, and Risk as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> physics tends to be much more reproducible than biology, and CS doubly-so. With physics I think there is a better culture of reproduction, but that is, I believe, due more to culture. That it is acceptable to "be slow". There's a high stress on being methodical and extremely precise. The prestige is built on making your work bulletproof, and so you're really encouraged to help others reproduce your work as it stre…
Comment linking /p/why-bell-labs-worked
on “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient and growing”Submitted vs. Outside Context Problems. Or, why smart people make bad predictions as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI am the author of the essay, 'Explosions Are Great, Actually.' https://1517.substack.com/p/explosions-are-great-actually My essay argues that the starship test flight and it's destruction were great signs of an attitude that we should embrace. But in the middle I point out, > But getting the golden mixture of sanity, knowledge, and craziness right is critically important. It is the same as rocket fuel, the wrong mi…
Comment linking /p/explosions-are-great-actually
on “DeSantis Signs Bill Shielding Musk’s SpaceX From ‘Spaceflight Entity Liability’”Submitted 1 in 30 – Artemis, Greatness, and Risk as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted 1 in 30 – Artemis, Greatness, and Risk as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Inside vs. Outside Context Problems as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Flux Capacitor, Funds, and Peers for Revolutionary Science as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Where Are All the Labspaces? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Renaissance Reimagined: Thiel Fellowship, Direct Assistance and Belief Capital as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Guide to Weekly, Monthly and Quarterly Business Reviews as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Explosions Are Great as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
