Top all-time · #433
David Perell
Personal blog · perell.com/blogwritingcareerproductivity
David Perell's personal blog at perell.com covers writing, career and productivity. Since 2018, 129 different Hacker News readers have linked it 228 times, most often “Peter Thiel's Religion”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 10 of 32 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Readers link David Perell's essays and podcasts for long analyses of Boeing's engineering culture, Peter Thiel, and the internet's effects, plus writing advice and a newsletter.
- Recommended for · 10 comments
- Boeing essay 'exhaustively'; Thiel essay 'great', 'well explained'; newsletter 'good essays'; writing syllabus 'helpful'
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 32 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I write, host a podcast, and run a writing school called Write of Passage.
Most-linked posts?
- Peter Thiel's Religion8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-08-05
- Peter Thiel's Religion8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2021-05-01
- Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-10-15
- Hugging the X-Axis5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-12-17
- Coolest Things I Learned in 20195 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-12-12
- Guide to Writing Online4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-08-14
- What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-03-16
- The Paradox of Abundance4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-01-12
- The Microwave Economy4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-03-02
- Never Ending Now4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-01-27
What Hacker News says?
Hi, I come across a lot of blogs when I curate for my newsletter Interesting Things [1]. Just looking through the links that have been curated in the past month or so, I would suggest: Tech - https://wasteofserver.com/ - https://tonsky.me/ - https://brianschrader.com/ - https://blog.thea.codes/ - https://fasterthanli.me/ - https://jvns.ca/ - https://blog.royalsloth.eu/ Non-tech - https://www.drorpoleg.com/ - About w…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Coolest Things I Learned in 2018 as a story · 539 points
HN discussion>>This is far from universally true, and to the small degree that it is true, it is an aberration from the vast majority of human history. I think you're interpreting my statement to suggest that people generally prioritize the public interest over their personal interest. I'm not. I'm only claiming that people, ceteris paribus, generally would prefer that society at large prosper. But they would not at their own ex…
Comment linking /essay/peter-thiel/
on “American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class”Submitted Against 3x Speed as a story · 523 points
HN discussionThis article covers the culture problem exhaustively https://www.perell.com/blog/boeing-737-max
Comment linking /blog/boeing-737-max
on “My Letter to the Editor of New York Times Magazine”Submitted What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance as a story · 438 points
HN discussionThis essay from David Perell touches on a similar concept: https://perell.com/note/lateral-thinking-with-withered-ideas... > It led to the 20th century’s most successful game console: the Game Boy. One day, a gaming engineer named Gunpei Yokoi was commuting home on the train when he saw a man playing with an LCD calculator next to him. Unfortunately, Nintendo didn’t have the budget to push the technological frontier…
Comment linking /note/lateral-thinking-with-withered-ideas/
on “Choose Boring Technology (2015)”Submitted Ideas That Changed My Life as a story · 422 points
HN discussionI think this is the effect of various companies trying to capture as much of our attention as possible because it makes sense for their bottom line. We are all victims of recency bias, so it makes sense for companies to prioritize more recent content. If it wasn't the case, the various social media apps wouldn't be as addictive as they are. I am not aware of a social media app feed that puts quality above recency (n…
Comment linking /essay/never-ending-now/
on “Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web?”Submitted Intellectual Loneliness as a story · 386 points
HN discussionHe has at least one seminal article that I know of: https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on Previously discussed with 220 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19413852 The first few paragraphs are not good and may be difficult to read through. But after that, things start falling into place and the rest of the article is absolutely great. But I agree that the other articles by the author may…
Comment linking /blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on
on “Ideas That Changed My Life”Submitted Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company as a story · 352 points
HN discussionSure but I’m not talking about just the CEO. I’m talking engineering managers all the way down. And I guess I’m not really talking about specific college degrees either, but a culture and mindset of engineering. Here’s an interesting article about how engineers lost influence in Boeing: https://perell.com/essay/boeing-737-max/
Comment linking /essay/boeing-737-max/
on “Boeing charged with 737 Max fraud conspiracy and agrees to pay over $2.5B”Submitted Coolest Things I Learned in 2019 as a story · 254 points
HN discussionI definitely agree that this kind of curriculum should be widely offered. I'm much more doubtful about the scope of the positive impact it would have. I think it's roughly the idea that lack of culture is caused by a distribution problem. I think internet more than showed that improving distribution works only up to a limit. There is a theory - the paradox of abundance - that paradoxally after you reach this limit y…
Comment linking /note/the-paradox-of-abundance/
on “Rhode island makes financial literacy classes required for high school students”Submitted The Price of Discipline as a story · 203 points
HN discussionIn the beginning of 2019, I felt overwhelmed with information overload across Twitter, HN, and the dozen or so newsletters I subscribed to. I ended up unsubscribing from just about everything and now follow a handful of great curators instead. It's probably the best thing I did last year to find more signal online. My favorite is Stew's Letter: https://stewfortier.com/subscribe It's a short email that comes out ever…
Comment linking /newsletter
on “Ask HN: What niche blogs are worthwhile to follow?”Submitted The Paradox of Abundance as a story · 167 points
HN discussionI found David Perell's podcast interview with Robert Cottrell a fascinating discussion of the economics of journalism: https://www.perell.com/podcast/robert-cottrell On a different topic, why don't I subscribe? Lots of reasons, I suppose, including other priorities for my income combined with a horrible value/dollar ratio. But that's not really it. Before I'd even consider paying for journalism, I'd need to trust th…
Comment linking /podcast/robert-cottrell
on “Won’t Subscribe”Submitted Imitate, Then Innovate as a story · 166 points
HN discussionThere is a notion that Boeing is/was a company with an insanely great engineering culture and their engineers lived in an idyllic culture of building great and safe products. This great culture was all lost as a result of the merger with McDonnell Douglas [1], [2], [3]. This argument is frequently put forth by ex-Boeing engineers. This is an apologia for Boeing's behavior which killed 346 people and endangered the l…
Comment linking /blog/boeing-737-max
on “DOJ fines Boeing over $2.5B, charges it with fraud conspiracy”Submitted The Guide to Writing Online as a story · 154 points
HN discussionhttps://www.perell.com/newsletter Good essays and interesting Friday finds section.
Comment linking /newsletter
on “Ask HN: What are the underrated newsletters you like reading?”Submitted What Should You Work On? as a story · 111 points
HN discussionI also strongly recommend you to read From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner [0] together with What the Dormouse Said . The two books are really an eye-opener and revealed how everything connected together. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Turner_(author) > Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing t…
Comment linking /blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on
on “Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)”Submitted Riding the Writing Wave as a story · 100 points
HN discussionReminds me of this site that was linked here a while ago: think it was https://perell.com/essay/coolest-things-2018/ . Curated content can be better than aggregators like HN. That said, there's a lot of low effort curated content as well, think buzzfeed and the like.
Comment linking /essay/coolest-things-2018/
on “How to Boost Self Esteem and Stop Procrastinating”Submitted What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income? as a story · 90 points
HN discussionI personally do not care about Problem 1. I mostly use Twitter in a passive way -- following people that are experts on the topics that I'm interested in. I assume if you want to get a reasonable following you need to put quite the effort in it. Problem 2 appears but I've noticed that muting works well enough to avoid it. Problem 3 does not seem to be Twitter-specific but again blocking and muting seems to work for…
Comment linking /note/the-paradox-of-abundance/
on “Quitting Twitter”Submitted Guide to Writing Online as a story · 84 points
HN discussion
