Top all-time · #1646
Ninjas and Robots on Svbtle
Personal blog · ninjasandrobots.com · on HN as natestartupsdesign
Ninjas and Robots on Svbtle is a personal blog at ninjasandrobots.com about startups and design. Since 2009, 43 different Hacker News readers have linked it 193 times, most often “A Handyman's Toolbox”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this blog for posts on writing ("Write drunk, edit sober"), understanding what customers want (Nathan Kontny's "what people really want"), and web design mistakes. The comments are bare links or citations.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Ninjas and Robots | Engineer, Designer, Founder | Founding Engineer at Census (acquired by Fivetran) | Ex-CEO Highrise | Y Combinator Alum | Made Draft
Most-linked posts?
- A Handyman's Toolbox2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-06-04
- Stay in the building2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-07-09
- A 40 billion dollar t-shirt2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-05-09
- Nathan Kontny to become CEO of Highrise2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-08-19
- How to Be Interesting2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-12-28
- A litmus test for your idea2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-08-28
- Mistakes Web Designers Make2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-06-02
- Write drunk; edit sober.2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-09-06
What Hacker News says?
If you're into finding more video blogs: I'm at http://youtube.com/natekontny I cover running businesses (successfully and unsuccessfully), software design, science experiments, and just getting through life :) (Cuz it ain't easy for anyone) (I've also written a ton about these topics over the years at http://ninjasandrobots.com and http://medium.com/@natekontny )
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted Facebook Pages: Why I don’t like Nest thermostat or anything else anymore as a story · 318 points
HN discussionI sent this to the blog author, but then felt maybe someone else might get something from reading it. My offer stands for everyone here. Most of us are going through or have gone through this same struggle eloquently written in this post. I'm here to help brainstorm or chew on any problems any of us are working through. Just need to email me. nate.kontny gmail -------------------------- I really enjoyed your blog po…
Comment linking /
on “My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love”Submitted I have no idea what I'm doing as a story · 311 points
HN discussionKejia Zhu ( http://kzhu.net/does-life-end-at-35.html ) helped me to get through the delusional obsession for quick success. I gave it to read to all my friends and it's definitely a must for all HN folks. The good ol' Raymond's How to Become a Hacker ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html ) will teach you the Hacker attitude, which you can apply to anything. It doesn't matter whether you're a programmer o…
Comment linking /a-handymans-toolbox
on “Ask HN: What are the most inspirational blog posts you've ever read?”Submitted Not Wanted as a story · 261 points
HN discussionMakes me think about the post I read from Nathan Kontny http://ninjasandrobots.com/what-people-really-want Its really hard to do this if you are not completely immersed in the problem yourself. The legacy players who have this strong position have the years of understanding the problem and that is why they command the market and at times dont even have to innovate to protect their position. If you yourself are not y…
Comment linking /what-people-really-want
on “My Product Has Failed”Submitted Pricing in reverse: use a product's price to figure out what you need to build as a story · 153 points
HN discussion> this article is about technology Not, it is not. Here are some articles about technology: http://www.brython.info/ http://dehora.net/journal/2013/06/01/on-go/ http://ninjasandrobots.com/three-mistakes-i-see-web-designer... http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/51904590190/processing-and... The article this discussion is about is entirely about politics and economics, as is the resultant discussion. You will note that…
Comment linking /three-mistakes-i-see-web-designers-make-over-and-over-again
on “Why Stuff From China Is So Cheap”Submitted How to get business ideas – remove steps as a story · 147 points
HN discussionWrite drunk, edit sober. http://ninjasandrobots.com/write-drunk-edit-sober
Comment linking /write-drunk-edit-sober
on “Ask HN: I'm building one HTML5 game per week, need feedback”Submitted Those who teach as a story · 144 points
HN discussionI've got a half thought about concept that maybe we need a concept like AMP back. I hated AMP. I'm glad it's dead. But you could use it to define things that you were at least advised that it would be shown in the google ui and carousel. I feel like we need a guarantee from the LLMs that if we provide some kind of meta data in our source material you'll honor stuff from it. Like show our advertisers so we get some r…
Comment linking /.well-known/sponsor-card.json
on “Google Declaring War on the Web”Submitted A startup founder's hourly rate as a story · 139 points
HN discussionhey man! been a long time. you raise an interesting point, and i have thought about it, but not very long and with no real conclusion. like even summarizing ryan singer's github nav redesign: http://ninjasandrobots.com/throwdowns/2 he actually ends up with a couple explorations in there. or like the new guy at 37s. here's his backback redesign too: http://jasonzimdars.com/svn/backpack.html and he's got a couple expl…
Comment linking /throwdowns/2
on “Ask HN: Please review our web app - User Interface Throwdowns”Submitted Draft. Version control for writing as a story · 136 points
HN discussionSweet, exactly. Feel free to throw that up there! http://ninjasandrobots.com/throwdowns/new
Comment linking /throwdowns/new
on “Ask HN: Please review our web app - User Interface Throwdowns”Submitted I don’t have any connections as a story · 117 points
HN discussionHere's a list of all my current subscriptions, hope this helps you get started: * brack3t: http://brack3t.com/feeds/all.atom.xml * CasJam: http://casjam.com/feed * Coding Horror: http://feeds.feedburner.com/codinghorror * dan shipper: http://feeds.feedburner.com/danshipper * Dave Winer: http://scripting.com/rss.xml * Doug Hellmann: http://feeds.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW * Eric Florenzano's Blog: http://eflorenzano.com…
Comment linking /feed
on “Ask HN: Where do you get ideas to build side-projects?”Submitted Google, I've had enough. How about a Compromise? as a story · 114 points
HN discussionGreat summary. One problem that tripped me up with http caching in rails was invalidating client http caches when a template changes and you're doing conditional etags based on an object's updated at timestamp. So basically when you do fresh_when(object), your rails app basically will only tell an http client this thing is stale if the object's updated_at timestamp changes. It doesn't take into account if the actual…
Comment linking /rails-caching-a-problem-with-etags-and-a-solution
on “HTTP Caching in Ruby with Rails”Submitted Bill Murray on taking chances and saying "No" as a story · 78 points
HN discussionNathan is me! :) I put out a lot about who I am here: http://ninjasandrobots.com/ Basically just a guy trying to make businesses. Some work out, some don't. Lately I've been working on Draft ( http://draftin.com ) which has been going pretty well. I'd also if you have a chance, I'd love to receive any feedback you have about Highrise (nate.kontny+highrise@gmail.com)
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on “Big news for Highrise”- vm · 2012-12-12
Submitted Faster Rails partial rendering and caching. 78% improvement of test application as a story · 76 points
HN discussion Ah, that raises a good point. When I left my first company Inkling ( http://inklingmarkets.com ) to run what became Draft ( http://draftin.com ) full time, I realized I didn't have my own "brand". People know me through Inkling. Especially when it came to writing. All this writing that I was really proud of was on the Inkling blog. And now I don't work there anymore. No one even knows that writing exists. Your frien…
Comment linking /
on “Why top startups are getting radically personal”Submitted Herd as a story · 75 points
HN discussionYeah, i got duped. Sorry y'all. I talk about it here more now this morning: https://ninjasandrobots.com/paul-graham-flagged-for-ai-use Will definitely now AI check for slop better before even posting. But was curious how automated and cheap I could make it. Isn't turning out that well yet. Also I put up a PR to remove silconopera from Kagi Small Web. Because it breaks multiple of their guidelines: multi-author, all…
Comment linking /paul-graham-flagged-for-ai-use
on “The Customer Who Almost Killed Slack, Stripe, and Airbnb”Submitted Why are some people so much luckier than others? as a story · 72 points
HN discussionhttps://ninjasandrobots.com
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on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”Submitted A litmus test for your idea as a story · 72 points
HN discussion
