Top all-time · #848
Kenneth Reitz
Personal blog · kennethreitz.org/essays · on HN as kennethreitzprogrammingaiphilosophy
Kenneth Reitz's personal blog at kennethreitz.org covers programming, ai and philosophy. Since 2012, 77 different Hacker News readers have linked it 97 times, most often “Open Source Gave Me Everything Until I Had Nothing Left to Give”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (26) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Reitz's personal essays on open source sustainability, Python packaging workflows like requirements and pip, and his writing about his bipolar disorder and mental health.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- Described as useful to read, and one commenter told readers to check out his podcast series.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 26 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Kenneth Reitz — creator of Requests, the Python HTTP library. Writing at the intersection of technology and consciousness: mental health, AI collaboration, open source, and building software for humans.
Most-linked posts?
- Open Source Gave Me Everything Until I Had Nothing Left to Give5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-03-18
- A Better Pip Workflow5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-05-23
- MentalHealthError: an exception occurred. (2016)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-02-08
- A Better Pip Workflow4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-02-25
- NumPy as Synth Engine2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-30
- When Values Eat Their Young: How Ideal-Driven Groups Drift into Their Own Shadow2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-09-16
- A Server Called Mercury2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-06-05
- Announcing Pipenv2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-01-23
- Pipenv: One Year Later and a Call for Help2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-02-04
- On Cybersecurity and Being Targeted2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-08-10
What Hacker News says?
http://kennethreitz.org/be-cordial-or-be-on-your-way.html
Comment linking /be-cordial-or-be-on-your-way.html
on “What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project”Submitted Announcing Pipenv as a story · 664 points
HN discussionOperator Mono! https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/test-driving-a-200-progr...
Comment linking /essays/test-driving-a-200-programming-font-operator-mono
on “Announcing Pipenv”Submitted MentalHealthError: an exception occurred as a story · 593 points
HN discussionHey other Reitz fans. Make sure to check out his newish podcast series: https://www.kennethreitz.org/import-this/
Comment linking /import-this/
on “Announcing Pipenv”Submitted Requests, Python HTTP for Humans, reached v1.0 as a story · 386 points
HN discussionInterestingly the author states his symptoms started through a combination of lack of sleep and dating a disturbed individual [1]. Such a diagnosis is possibly offensive, ableist and unscientific, however there are many such anecdotal reports of people with (developing or fully developed) mental illness pairing up. While there is little evidence of such pairing up being a cause (i.e. some sort of "contagiousness", a…
Comment linking /essays/purging-the-unexpected-negative-a-narcissistic-partner
on “MentalHealthError: an exception occurred”Submitted Maya – Python Datetimes for Humans as a story · 350 points
HN discussionI also suspect that this is the same person mentioned here: http://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/purging-the-unexpected-ne... For many guys, "crazy chick" is the only language they have to describe an abusive relationship. It's not the most helpful phrase, so it's best replaced with a clearer one.
Comment linking /essays/purging-the-unexpected-negative-a-narcissistic-partner
on “MentalHealthError: an exception occurred”Submitted The Reality of Developer Burnout as a story · 340 points
HN discussionDavid Beazley : http://www.dabeaz.com/ Kenneth Reitz : https://www.kennethreitz.org/ Armin Ronacher : http://lucumr.pocoo.org/ Julien Danjou : https://julien.danjou.info/ Hynek Schlawack : https://hynek.me/ Donald Stufft : https://caremad.io/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”Submitted On Cybersecurity and Being Targeted as a story · 281 points
HN discussionI would recommend Python 3 for sure. I just use the installers from https://www.python.org/ and don't tend to have any problems. I prefer lightweight tools, so I use Visual Studio Code. It won't hold your hand, but neither will it get in your way. When working on projects, get in the habit of using virtualenvs. It's a small amount of overhead, but will save you a ton of frustration in the long run. A primer on windo…
Comment linking /essays/a-better-pip-workflow
on “New Surface Pro”Submitted Why I Left Medium as a story · 258 points
HN discussionIt's the least shitty of all other designs. It picked the best design decisions from existing package managers. By default it is project local (as opposed to global like what rubygems, pip, and others are), it's recursive and largely reproducible (fully reproducible using lock files). The resolution algorithm is also deterministic and simple, you can implement it in an hour. Although other languages are catching up…
Comment linking /essays/announcing-pipenv
on “Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js”Submitted On Heroku and 2012 as a story · 225 points
HN discussionOne can argue semantics whether you call it a UI or a CLI, but hey. There's a number of GUI clients out there that depending on your criteria could be considered better. They're usually not as powerful as the CLI client though, and if they are, features like accessing the reflog are hard to find and use. There's also a few alternative CLIs out there, I've just done a quick googling and came across http://www.saintsj…
Comment linking /essays/legit-the-sexy-git-cli
on “Git Undo”Submitted A Better Pip Workflow as a story · 171 points
HN discussionReitz has self-confessed manic episodes due to bipolar disorder: https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/mentalhealtherror-an-exc... https://journal.kennethreitz.org/entry/on-mania
Comment linking /essays/mentalhealtherror-an-exception-occurred
on “Pipenv: promises a lot, delivers very little”Submitted Pipenv: One Year Later and a Call for Help as a story · 123 points
HN discussionHe has been pretty transparent with his bipolar disorder. Speaking from experience mania drastically changes your personality. https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/mentalhealtherror-an-exc...
Comment linking /essays/mentalhealtherror-an-exception-occurred
on “I'm not collaborating with Kenneth Reitz”Submitted Documentation is King as a story · 85 points
HN discussionInterestingly, Pipenv is no longer in the list of projects on his website: https://www.kennethreitz.org/projects What that means, I don't know.
Comment linking /projects
on “I'm not collaborating with Kenneth Reitz”Submitted The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech as a story · 65 points
HN discussionFor those out of the loop: http://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/on-cybersecurity-and-bein...
Comment linking /essays/on-cybersecurity-and-being-targeted
on “Setup Keybase.io, GPG and Git to sign commits on GitHub”Submitted Introducing Flask-Sockets as a story · 63 points
HN discussionThe idea is described at https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/a-better-pip-workflow
Comment linking /essays/a-better-pip-workflow
on “Freezing Python’s Dependency Hell”Submitted Test-Driving a $200 Coding Font: Operator Mono as a story · 50 points
HN discussionEarlier response to the vorpus criticism (presumably): https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/requests3-update
Comment linking /essays/requests3-update
on “Issue: find a new home for repos including Requests”Submitted If I could amend PEP 8 as a story · 46 points
HN discussion
