Top all-time · #1950
Kellan Elliott-McCrea
Personal blog · laughingmeme.orgprogrammingculture
Kellan Elliott-McCrea's personal blog at laughingmeme.org covers programming and culture. Since 2008, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 43 times, most often “Towards an understanding of technical debt”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kellan Elliott-McCrea's blog for writing on scaling software, false positives in abuse detection and software's discontents, plus older notes on URL shortening hints and text summarization.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- Described as giving 'some of the better advice' on the hardest parts of software scaling; a post on ticket servers for unique IDs was called 'neat'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A personal blog of Kellan Elliott-McCrea. I don’t really know what a “laughing meme” is. It sounded cool in 1999.
Most-linked posts?
- Towards an understanding of technical debt3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-01-12
- Cost of False Positives3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-07-24
- Full access to your own data: anything less is sharecropping2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-05-18
- Don’t pave the paths used by the unhappy cows2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-01-31
- Five years, building a culture, and handing it off2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-09-01
- Managers Are Catalysts2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-09-19
- Facebook, Graph API, and Open Graph2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-04-25
- Software and Its Discontents, Part 2: An Explosion of Complexity2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-24
- Code has always been the easy part2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-02-21
What Hacker News says?
> I think that Berners-Lee and W3C get way too much credit for the web. And this is an incredibly arrogant statement by Mr. Berners-Lee. I also think that green is a totally awesome color, and that we can breed birds with horses to produce pegasii. For more attacks on the W3C at best tangential to Mr. Berners-Lee's actual essay, read on. > Facebook has in-fact done some serious web innovation the last years and W3C…
Comment linking /2010/05/18/minimal-competence-data-access-data-ownership-and-sharecropping/
on “Tim Berners-Lee says Facebook is a trap”Submitted Cost of False Positives as a story · 92 points
HN discussionBut when we render the Comment back to you in that same request we need the ID that the comment will have, but we don't know the ID until we write it out. Wouldn't something like Snowflake help for this particular case? Snowflake is a network service for generating unique ID numbers at high scale with some simple guarantees. http://github.com/twitter/snowflake Kellan (from Flickr) has a neat post about Ticket server…
Comment linking /2010/02/08/ticket-servers-distributed-unique-primary-keys-on-the-cheap/
on “Why Reddit's been slow lately (dev group post)”Submitted Five years, building a culture, and handing it off as a story · 83 points
HN discussionI see Twitter getting beaten up a lot for not deleting the spammers faster. Etsy gets beaten up for not deleting the “resellers” faster. Flickr used to get yelled at for not catching the photo stealers or porn spammers faster. “It’s so fucking easy, they’re right over there, here, let me show them to you, what’s your problem?” This comes from not understanding the cost benefit ratio of false positives in identifying…
Comment linking /2011/06/02/sorry-we-did-something-wrong-twitter-on-suspending-my-account/
on “Cost of False Positives”Submitted Towards an understanding of technical debt as a story · 54 points
HN discussionRachel by the Bay ( https://rachelbythebay.com/ ) has long impressed me as someone who clearly is deep in the actual work of systems, day in and day out, and can write well about it. Julia Evans has a wonderful approach as well, and has amazing talent for teaching: https://jvns.ca/ Kellan Elliott-McCrea ( https://laughingmeme.org/ ) has given the world some of the better advice on the hardest parts of software scali…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Stanford CS 153 help”Submitted Twitter Woes Discussed By Someone With a Clue as a story · 33 points
HN discussionhttp://laughingmeme.org/2016/01/10/towards-an-understanding-...
Comment linking /2016/01/10/towards-an-understanding-of-technical-debt/
on “Beautiful Technical Debt”Submitted Vibe coding for teams, thoughts to date as a story · 31 points
HN discussionYour understanding of what is difficult is wrong because you're looking at it as a detection problem when it's actually a false positive problem. See: http://laughingmeme.org/2011/07/23/cost-of-false-positives/
Comment linking /2011/07/23/cost-of-false-positives/
on “Announcing the Twitter Trust and Safety Council”Submitted Full access to your own data: anything less is sharecropping as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThis should get you started: http://laughingmeme.org/2003/07/28/text-summarization/ http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=52 http://libots.sourceforge.net/
Comment linking /2003/07/28/text-summarization/
on “Automagically Generated Summaries of MIT OCW Algorithms Lectures”Submitted The Brooklyn Problem as a story · 5 points
HN discussionhttp://laughingmeme.org/2009/04/03/url-shortening-hinting/
Comment linking /2009/04/03/url-shortening-hinting/
on “Short URL hints / autodiscovery RFC”Submitted Surviving being senior (tech) management as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis sounds right to me: > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. Helps explain why some people are…
Comment linking /2026/02/09/code-has-always-been-the-easy-part.html
on “The AI coding divide: craft lovers vs. result chasers”Submitted Managers Are Catalysts as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA recent blog post making similar points: https://laughingmeme.org/2023/01/23/software-and-its-discont...
Comment linking /2023/01/23/software-and-its-discontents-part-2-complexity.html
on “The Market for Lemons - Alex Russell on JS frontends”Submitted Hack: claude -p as a story · 2 points
HN discussionPart 2 : https://laughingmeme.org/2023/01/23/software-and-its-discont... Part 3 : https://laughingmeme.org/2023/01/29/software-and-its-discont...
Comment linking /2023/01/29/software-and-its-discontents-part-3-the-magic.html
on “Software and its Discontents, Part 1”Submitted Code has always been the easy part as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Link Blog in the Year 2024 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Don’t pave the paths used by the unhappy cows as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Towards an understanding of technical debt as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Etsy CEO: Five years, building a culture, and handing it off as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Talk on the technical track as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Try Coding Dear Boy as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted +1 for knowing your history as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Couple of Caveats on Queuing as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
