Top all-time · #28
Things Of Interest
Personal blog · qntm.orgwritingculture
Things Of Interest is a personal blog at qntm.org about writing and culture. Since 2008, 719 different Hacker News readers have linked it 1,049 times, most often “Lena”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly link qntm's essay on abolishing time zones and his short stories, such as Responsibility and MMAcevedo, as a reply in a thread.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Comments call the stories and essays 'really fun', 'a good essay', 'a nice writeup'; one likes the minimalist design.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Lena138 people · 156 mentions · first linked 2021-01-05
- So You Want to Abolish Time Zones (2015)94 people · 129 mentions · first linked 2016-07-05
- It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code41 people · 41 mentions · first linked 2020-06-28
- I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)38 people · 44 mentions · first linked 2016-04-11
- Ra26 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2016-05-03
- I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility22 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2010-06-07
- /files/hatetris/hatetris.html19 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2017-06-03
- How to Destroy the Earth (2006)17 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2016-05-31
- There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)16 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2020-06-30
- Lena15 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2020-11-05
What Hacker News says?
I got reminded of an even older sci-fi story: https://qntm.org/responsibility
Comment linking /responsibility
on “Sora: Creating video from text”Submitted It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020) as a story · 733 points
HN discussionMaybe suicide linux? https://qntm.org/suicide
Comment linking /suicide
on “macOS unable to open any non-Apple application”Submitted There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018) as a story · 728 points
HN discussionhttps://qntm.org/abolish
Comment linking /abolish
on “US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent”Submitted Hatetris – Tetris which always gives you the worst piece as a story · 674 points
HN discussionThat idea has some quite surprising and arguably inconvenient consequences: https://qntm.org/abolish Most notably, the concepts of "today" and "tomorrow" stop making sense!
Comment linking /abolish
on “US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent”Submitted Lena as a story · 620 points
HN discussionretort: https://qntm.org/abolish
Comment linking /abolish
on “US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent”Submitted I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007) as a story · 401 points
HN discussion> Timezones don't try to be "correct", they try to be useful This is correct. As engineers we can design the most symmetric and "perfect" system, but at the end of the day, if it's not useful, people will just adopt something else instead. > If you want to argue hard science, you'll have an uphill job of explaining to me why there should be 24 timezones and not 1440 of them. There's a good argument against having to…
Comment linking /continuous
on “US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent”Submitted How to Destroy the Earth (2006) as a story · 293 points
HN discussionA couple of fun posts you might enjoy: So You Want To Abolish Time Zones: https://qntm.org/abolish So You Want Continuous Time Zones: https://qntm.org/continuous What I've gathered from these and similar articles is that time just kinda sucks in general, and no matter what we do we're going to suffer.
Comment linking /continuous
on “US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent”Submitted Developer Philosophy as a story · 288 points
HN discussionThis is going to mean a lot of jobs for database programmers! http://qntm.org/gay 15 years ago we solved the Y2K problem. Now we've got to solve the SQL2Gays problem!
Comment linking /gay
on “Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules”Submitted Learn regular expressions in about 55 minutes as a story · 277 points
HN discussionI quite like the blog https://qntm.org/ which has a minimalist design in this sense.
Comment linking /
on “Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News”Submitted Suicide Linux as a story · 272 points
HN discussionhttps://qntm.org/abolish
Comment linking /abolish
on “American Academy of Sleep Medicine calls for elimination of daylight saving time”Submitted Programming trick questions as a story · 249 points
HN discussionOops, I meant: https://qntm.org/continuous
Comment linking /continuous
on “American Academy of Sleep Medicine calls for elimination of daylight saving time”Submitted I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility as a story · 226 points
HN discussionhttps://qntm.org/abolish
Comment linking /abolish
on “American Academy of Sleep Medicine calls for elimination of daylight saving time”Submitted All I want for Christmas is a negative leap second as a story · 196 points
HN discussionSo You Want To Abolish Time Zones: https://qntm.org/abolish
Comment linking /abolish
on “American Academy of Sleep Medicine calls for elimination of daylight saving time”Submitted Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes as a story · 175 points
HN discussionhttps://qntm.org/continuous
Comment linking /continuous
on “American Academy of Sleep Medicine calls for elimination of daylight saving time”Submitted So you want to abolish time zones as a story · 159 points
HN discussionhttps://qntm.org/continuous
Comment linking /continuous
on “American Academy of Sleep Medicine calls for elimination of daylight saving time”Submitted Suicide Linux (2009) as a story · 147 points
HN discussion
