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- Hacker News
- "The meandering intro"
Not only the intro. Many bloggers try to write as if they'd writing a story, building suspense and all. For technical writing, don't bury the lede.
by weinzierl - As someone who has been interested in creating a blog in 2026, I still wonder what is the value of it in the age of LLM. No one is reading anymore… what do others think?by hashtag-til
- Complete aside: I was reading about Jeff Bezos, who famously instituted required pre-reading at every meeting. That is, the meeting presenter prepared a 1-2 page paper on the context, goals, and proposed outcome of each meeting.
Bezos has a sharp mind and often got impatient with the paper for not getting to the point quickly enough. He would deal with the boredom by highlighting all the mistaken assumptions and errors in the paper, which would often derail the meeting.
One VP came up with a way to deal with that. His advice was to write the paper as if the reader was an expert in the field--no definitions, no preamble, just assume the reader already knows.
Then remove every other paragraph.
The result was a paper that forced Bezos to focus and think about every sentence just to understand it. That made it easier to get his agreement at the end.
by GMoromisato - Last week, after following an HN link, I found myself thinking that tech blogs were starting to need that "Jump to Recipe" link that has taken over the food blogging world (for the better).by linsomniac
- "The meandering intro" might be the most common mistake, by far, but the most damaging mistake, by far, is the failure to connect the topic with something the readers are familiar with (anti-pattern #2). Some things simply require a certain level of expertise/prerequisites to begin to understand, but I've repeatedly seen in software blogging, READMEs, etc. a failure to answer "what is this, compared to what I'm familiar with, and if I'm not familiar with anything relevant, why should I want to be?"
This applies to almost everything in the software space. New tool? New design pattern? New library? Language idiom? Language? Or, for more modern takes, new model? New harness? New harness option? New use pattern? Give a brief summary of what a project looks like without it, to convey the problem that its existence alone is solving. Then go into the details of how it might compare to other solutions.
Maybe it's just a specific way of how my brain works that finds this sort of information intuitive, and the lack of it particularly annoying.
- "Do this not that" lists are always contextual and situational. Some of this makes sense in the context of a professional or business site, but make sure your goals align before taking the advice.
If you're writing on your personal blog then take all of this with the size of salt crystal you feel it deserves. Personally, that's about the size of an Acme safe hanging over a cliff waiting for an unsuspecting listicle writer^h^hcoyote.
by zrail - Some weeks i feel like the majority of software blogs I see are LLM written now. They are usually terrible.
Maybe someone can tell the LLM's about these anti-patterns, like, seriously, would it help?
I'd prefer of course if people just actually themselves wrote the text that they expect me to read my human self.
by jrochkind1 - I always insist that education is not storytelling and should not be structured as such. People want to save "twists" and "revelations" for maximum impact and it's harmful. It should actually be the other way around and be, keeping the theme, "spoilery" and repetitive. Like a good presentation you should start by saying what you'll say, say it, then conclude by saying what you said.
LLMs have made this problem extremely worse. Imagine how'd you'd explain what an MCP is in a couple words and technically, then try to look it up. There's phone books worth of pages and text that never end up getting to the point.
by phreack