Essays & writing

Essays, interviews, reports, and discussions that outlived their original moment.

Hall of Fame: 422
Candidates: 763
Median span: 6.2 yrs
First seen: 2007

Subtypes in Essays & writing

6 subtypes

Essays & articles 1040 links 379 Hall · 661 Candidates News reports 81 links 24 Hall · 57 Candidates Forum discussions 21 links 9 Hall · 12 Candidates Interviews & profiles 19 links 3 Hall · 16 Candidates Social posts & threads 17 links 6 Hall · 11 Candidates Announcements 7 links 1 Hall · 6 Candidates

Browse Essays & writing by topic

Every link below is both Essays & writing and the selected topic.

18 topics

Strongest Hall records

422 items

We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)

web.mit.edu 58 submissions · 51 people · 18.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2015-04 Resurfaced 2026-01-29

1164max pts

Choose Boring Technology (2015)

mcfunley.com 46 submissions · 42 people · 11.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-06 Resurfaced 2026-08-13

1357max pts

What You Can't Say (2004)

www.paulgraham.com 31 submissions · 31 people · 14.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2014-03 Resurfaced 2022-03-16

241max pts

The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to "The Office"

www.ribbonfarm.com 24 submissions · 24 people · 16.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-12 Resurfaced 2026-03-07

325max pts

Why GNU grep is fast (2010)

lists.freebsd.org 14 submissions · 14 people · 11.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2015-03 Resurfaced 2022-07-24

512max pts

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

james-iry.blogspot.com 43 submissions · 42 people · 17.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2012-01 Resurfaced 2023-06-25

391max pts

Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)

www.kalzumeus.com 24 submissions · 22 people · 14.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-09 Resurfaced 2021-08-19

1021max pts

John Carmack on Inlined Code

number-none.com 21 submissions · 14 people · 11.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-01 Resurfaced 2024-10-06

556max pts

Maker's schedule, Manager's schedule (2009)

www.paulgraham.com 20 submissions · 20 people · 15.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2015-12 Resurfaced 2023-06-24

383max pts

Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

johnsalvatier.org 19 submissions · 17 people · 9.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-01 Resurfaced 2025-02-18

699max pts

Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy (2008)

paulgraham.com 17 submissions · 15 people · 17.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-03 Resurfaced 2023-01-18

392max pts

UTF-8 Everywhere

utf8everywhere.org 18 submissions · 17 people · 13.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-06 Resurfaced 2020-04-14

381max pts

Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

www.paulgraham.com 13 submissions · 12 people · 13.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-09 Resurfaced 2021-06-07

386max pts

Hiroshima (1946)

www.newyorker.com 17 submissions · 14 people · 10.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-11 Resurfaced 2025-08-02

181max pts

Why numbering should start at zero (1982)

www.cs.utexas.edu 17 submissions · 16 people · 13.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-12 Resurfaced 2023-07-16

169max pts

Microsoft is Dead (2007)

www.paulgraham.com 13 submissions · 13 people · 16.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-05 Resurfaced 2020-12-30

182max pts

The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009)

steveblank.com 15 submissions · 12 people · 14.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-12 Resurfaced 2023-12-16

458max pts

How I do my computing

stallman.org 13 submissions · 13 people · 14.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-10 Resurfaced 2023-07-29

334max pts

Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

lists.busybox.net 8 submissions · 8 people · 13.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-05 Resurfaced 2026-01-04

857max pts

24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

people.xiph.org 10 submissions · 10 people · 14.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-12 Resurfaced 2026-07-02

732max pts

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)

www.kalzumeus.com 31 submissions · 29 people · 16.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-11 Resurfaced 2021-03-07

176max pts

Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)

adamdrake.com 11 submissions · 10 people · 7.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-03 Resurfaced 2026-01-18

463max pts

On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning

norvig.com 13 submissions · 13 people · 14.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-06 Resurfaced 2025-12-16

313max pts

Myths about /dev/urandom

www.2uo.de 12 submissions · 12 people · 12.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-01 Resurfaced 2026-05-14

232max pts

Do Things that Don't Scale

paulgraham.com 18 submissions · 18 people · 12.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-08 Resurfaced 2025-08-15

1275max pts

Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

www.gnu.org 10 submissions · 10 people · 15.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2014-05 Resurfaced 2019-09-24

298max pts

The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)

www.jofreeman.com 18 submissions · 18 people · 16.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2025-01 Resurfaced 2025-01-22

387max pts

Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you

www.coding2learn.org 19 submissions · 18 people · 12.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-01 Resurfaced 2025-04-10

625max pts

Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

www.philzimmermann.com 15 submissions · 14 people · 14.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-08 Resurfaced 2026-10-14

422max pts

Lisping at JPL (2002)

www.flownet.com 22 submissions · 19 people · 16.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-01 Resurfaced 2025-05-22

307max pts

-2000 lines of code

www.folklore.org 10 submissions · 9 people · 12.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-03 Resurfaced 2022-11-05

646max pts

Why should I have written ZeroMQ in C, not C++ (2012)

250bpm.com 8 submissions · 8 people · 11.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-04 Resurfaced 2022-08-12 archived copy

289max pts

Falsehoods programmers believe about time

infiniteundo.com 14 submissions · 13 people · 13.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-01 Resurfaced 2022-08-22

364max pts

What Color is Your Function? (2015)

journal.stuffwithstuff.com 25 submissions · 22 people · 11.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-05 Resurfaced 2026-05-26

138max pts

Analysis of bank PIN numbers

www.datagenetics.com 21 submissions · 21 people · 13.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-08 Resurfaced 2024-05-14

255max pts

You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss (2008)

www.paulgraham.com 9 submissions · 9 people · 14.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2015-06 Resurfaced 2020-10-10

322max pts

Cities and Ambition

www.paulgraham.com 16 submissions · 16 people · 14.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2014-01 Resurfaced 2018-02-26

185max pts

A Spellchecker Used To Be A Major Feat of Software Engineering

prog21.dadgum.com 9 submissions · 9 people · 17.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-12 Resurfaced 2025-08-09

363max pts

I could do that in a weekend (2016)

danluu.com 14 submissions · 11 people · 9.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-04 Resurfaced 2026-07-20

712max pts

How to Disagree

www.paulgraham.com 15 submissions · 15 people · 14.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2012-11 Resurfaced 2018-02-24

183max pts

History of the browser user-agent string (2008)

webaim.org 37 submissions · 34 people · 17.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-03 Resurfaced 2026-01-27

558max pts

Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

www.scottaaronson.com 28 submissions · 28 people · 17.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2015-02 Resurfaced 2020-01-21

223max pts

Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

www.viemu.com 10 submissions · 10 people · 13.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-04 Resurfaced 2021-12-07 archived copy

232max pts

Computer latency: 1977-2017

danluu.com 18 submissions · 15 people · 8.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-12 Resurfaced 2022-11-20

588max pts

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

idlewords.com 10 submissions · 10 people · 9.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-05 Resurfaced 2026-06-01

883max pts

A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++

blog.regehr.org 15 submissions · 15 people · 14.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-08 Resurfaced 2025-03-13

111max pts

Notes on structured concurrency, or: Go statement considered harmful

vorpus.org 21 submissions · 21 people · 8.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-03 Resurfaced 2022-07-02

301max pts

Parse, Don’t Validate

lexi-lambda.github.io 9 submissions · 9 people · 6.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-03 Resurfaced 2026-02-10

642max pts

Structured Procrastination: Do Less, Deceive Yourself, and Succeed Long-Term

www.structuredprocrastination.com 22 submissions · 21 people · 19.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-04 Resurfaced 2022-02-10

323max pts

My history with Forth and stack machines (2010)

yosefk.com 16 submissions · 16 people · 14.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-08 Resurfaced 2024-12-28

147max pts

What is code

www.bloomberg.com 20 submissions · 19 people · 10.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-06 Resurfaced 2026-01-01 archived copy

1384max pts

The Hardest Program I've Ever Written – How a code formatter works (2015)

journal.stuffwithstuff.com 11 submissions · 7 people · 10.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-11 Resurfaced 2025-10-29

500max pts

Suicide Linux

qntm.org 10 submissions · 10 people · 16.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-10 Resurfaced 2026-02-16

272max pts

Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go

andrewkelley.me 12 submissions · 12 people · 12.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-08 Resurfaced 2017-09-15

560max pts

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)

theamericanscholar.org 20 submissions · 20 people · 16.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-12 Resurfaced 2026-05-06

238max pts

DNA seen through the eyes of a coder (2017)

ds9a.nl 21 submissions · 19 people · 13.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-01 Resurfaced 2018-01-25

326max pts

In defense of swap: common misconceptions (2018)

chrisdown.name 9 submissions · 9 people · 7.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-04 Resurfaced 2025-09-21

182max pts

Life is Short

paulgraham.com 14 submissions · 13 people · 10.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-08 Resurfaced 2022-12-25

970max pts

How Google Code Search Worked: Regex Matching with a Trigram Index (2012)

swtch.com 15 submissions · 15 people · 12.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-12 Resurfaced 2024-05-27

434max pts

I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup

slatestarcodex.com 16 submissions · 16 people · 8.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-09 Resurfaced 2023-09-06

293max pts

Recently resurfaced in essays & writing

latest 20+ point return

Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

www.philzimmermann.com 15 submissions · 14 people · 14.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-08 Resurfaced 2026-10-14

422max pts

Using the wrong dictionary (2014)

jsomers.net 15 submissions · 14 people · 12.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-12 Resurfaced 2026-10-13

291max pts

The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds

grantland.com 15 submissions · 8 people · 12.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-10 Resurfaced 2026-09-24

315max pts

No hello – please don't just say hello in chat

nohello.net 6 submissions · 6 people · 4.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2025-06 Resurfaced 2026-09-17

249max pts

Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

www.techemails.com 6 submissions · 6 people · 3.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-09 Resurfaced 2026-09-07

437max pts

Candidates

Browse 763 candidates

Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine

longnow.org 29 submissions · 28 people · 15.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2024-09-07

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

225max pts

Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

www.newsweek.com 20 submissions · 20 people · 12.5 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2024-02-18

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

130max pts

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf]

www.usenix.org 18 submissions · 16 people · 9.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-03-12

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

244max pts

A Mathematician’s Lament (2002) [pdf]

www.maa.org 27 submissions · 22 people · 9.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-05-13 archived copy

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

170max pts

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)

www.nickbostrom.com 19 submissions · 18 people · 13.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2021-12-05

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

81max pts

Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)

www.cs.virginia.edu 17 submissions · 17 people · 14.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-12-31

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

194max pts

Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

charlespetzold.com 8 submissions · 8 people · 14.2 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-01-01 archived copy

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

108max pts

What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered? (2011)

stackoverflow.com 22 submissions · 22 people · 16.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2013-09-19

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

157max pts

C Is Best

sqlite.org 4 submissions · 4 people · 7.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2026-01-06

Needs:5 submissions

408max pts

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (2005)

journals.plos.org 13 submissions · 13 people · 10.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2024-09-24

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

231max pts

Books and lectures don't work

andymatuschak.org 11 submissions · 11 people · 7.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-09-28

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

195max pts

NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)

www.cypherspace.org 4 submissions · 4 people · 10.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-09-18

Needs:5 submissions

564max pts

HOWTO: Be more productive (2005)

www.aaronsw.com 14 submissions · 14 people · 18.5 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-10-24

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

259max pts

How do I give our security auditor the information he wants? (2011)

serverfault.com 13 submissions · 13 people · 14.6 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-06-18

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

204max pts

Fixing Unix Filenames (2012)

www.dwheeler.com 15 submissions · 15 people · 17.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2019-03-17

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

107max pts

Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking

fs.blog 11 submissions · 11 people · 4.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-12-15

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

205max pts

Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015)

danluu.com 9 submissions · 9 people · 11.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2017-11-10

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

243max pts

The Bitter Lesson

www.incompleteideas.net 42 submissions · 41 people · 7.6 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2024-02-27

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

152max pts

Suspicious Discontinuities

danluu.com 4 submissions · 4 people · 6.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2026-06-27

Needs:5 submissions

644max pts

Dynamic Languages Are Static Languages (2011)

existentialtype.wordpress.com 15 submissions · 15 people · 13.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2015-07-22

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

54max pts