Forem: lumenwrites

How to write posts that do well on Hacker News

lumenwrites — Sat, 26 Feb 2022 18:05:14 +0000

For the past 10 years, dang was the main moderator of Hacker News. Recently he has shared his notes on how to write articles that the HN community will find interesting. This is the organized and distilled summary of the key ideas.

Address readers as peers, not as customers

The biggest mistake you can make is writing a polished but shallow post that sounds like an ad or a corporate-sounding piece of content marketing.

Don't write for some abstract customer that you hope exists out there, write the way you would talk to a peer, a fellow startup founder and an engineer.

Imagine a friend that you're meeting up with for drinks, who has no idea what you've been working on, but is smart, curious, and asks good questions.

Write things that gratify intellectual curiosity

Readers come to HN because they want to learn surprising details about hard problems.

Write about an interesting technical or business problem you've solved. Pursue your genuine intellectual curiosity, try to figure an answer to an interesting question, and share what you discovered along the way.

Clearly explain the problem you're solving

Introduce yourself and the problem:

Explain who you are, and your personal experience that makes you qualified to talk about the problem.
Convey why it matters, what makes it interesting and hard to solve.
What will your readers learn about the world, and about solving problems?
Illustrate your problem using concrete real-life examples, rather than abstract descriptions (which are vague and boring).

Make the problem easy to understand, but not so easy that your readers can guess the end from the beginning - make them curious to know the solution.

Frame it as a story about you solving an interesting problem

Write a story, not a tutorial. Unlike tutorials, which focus on specific steps explaining how to perform a task, good HN stories focus on what, why, and who, they take the reader along as you solve the problem.

I needed to do X so I tried Y. But I had trouble because of Z, and therefore I had to solve it with W. So I learned some surprising details A, B, and C.

Talk about the complex path you followed as you were trying to solve the problem, put us in the room with you at the time. It should be like a murder mystery, where the big reveal is unpredictable and surprising.

Explain how bad things were and talk about failed attempts to fix them, let your readers participate in the puzzle along the way. Everything that makes a problem harder than it seemed adds to an interesting story - false starts, unexpected disasters, obstacles, twists, surprising details.

Go into technical depth

HN readers want to know the under-the-hood complexities of how things work. Show readers that you respect them intellectually by giving them a hard problem, and sharing some unexpected aspects of the solution - take them behind the curtain, show them the messy reality, give them details to chew on, and leave them with the feeling of having learned something.

What tech/startup-related newsletters are you subscribed to?

lumenwrites — Sat, 04 Dec 2021 20:28:06 +0000

I'm really curious about newsletters as a business model that people seem to be having a lot of success with, I'm considering starting my own (in the tech/startups niche) and I'm looking for some good examples. Also, I'd like to discover some quality stuff worth subscribing to, just for fun.

What is the best way to implement a WYSIWYG editor?

lumenwrites — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 17:19:18 +0000

Hi! I'm building a react app that needs a very powerful and customizable WYSIWYG editor. I will start by implementing things that Ghost, Medium, Typora, and Gitbook editor can do, and then maybe need to add other powerful features including collaboration. My project is in early prototype stage, so I don't even know what kind of features I may need to build in the future.

What are my best options, which libraries should I consider?

Did anyone experiment with Slate.js, ProseMirror, Tiptap, other libraries I may not be aware of? Which ones are the most flexible/powerful, and future proof enough to build a long term project around?

Also, a side question - how hard is it to implement google-docs-like pagination in a WYSIWYG web text editor? I've asked on Slate.js chat, and apparently it's very hard, although I don't quite understand the reasons and details. Any tips on tackling that?

32 Ways to Invent Endless Content Ideas

lumenwrites — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 23:58:43 +0000

This is my collection of strategies for coming up with an unlimited number of content ideas. You can use them for your posts, youtube videos, podcast episodes, and so on.

Project-based ideas

Work on interesting projects, pursue challenging goals, and overcome obstacles on your path. Solving interesting challenges inevitably leads to original insights and epiphanies you can share with people.

Create how-to's and step-by-step tutorials, guide people through building a similar project (or a feature of the project you've built).

Learn by teaching

You don't have to be an expert in order to teach - study a subject you're interested in, try to develop a skill, keep notes, and share everything you're learning. If the ideas you're learning are useful to you, they will be useful to other people.

Many people even prefer to learn from the beginners, because as a beginner you will find it easier to relate to other beginners - you will be able to notice the most relevant problems and explain things in a more accessible way.

Organize your notes

You can simply organize your old notes. I keep a file where I write down all the interesting ideas I learn, insightful thoughts that occur to me, anything I want to be able to remember later.

This is very helpful, because when I want to write - I don't have to invent anything on the spot, I can just organize my old notes. If I found an idea insightful enough to write down, it is probably worth sharing with people.

Ideas based on reading

Get used to consuming high quality content - read books, watch video courses, watch interviews with smart people, listen to podcasts.

Write down the most interesting ideas in your own words, and organize them into Evergreen Atomic Notes.

Then you can curate the most useful takeaways from multiple sources, combine these notes into longer posts.

For even more ideas, you can look at the book titles, course titles, and the chapter titles for inspiration - most of them are excellent topics for a post.

Research-based ideas

When you're consuming good content, you're doing it passively, going wherever your curiosity leads you, learning whatever the books teach you.

But you can also pick a topic you're interested in, and deliberately research it - read wiki articles, blog posts, forum threads, and watch youtube videos. Write down the most insightful ideas, summarize them, and share them.

Explain complicated subjects

Look for ideas that are complex, difficult to understand, or explained in a very dry and boring way. If you go through the work of understanding them - you can make them accessible, concise, engaging, and fun. This will be very valuable to people.

Make connections

Develop an expertise in different areas that aren't usually connected, and find ways to value arbitrage between them - make interesting associations, apply useful ideas from one field to another.

This often leads to original insights and interesting inventions. Every time you learn a new idea, ask yourself - how does it apply to the fields I already know, does it solve any problems that I'm aware of?

For example, my post on how writing is similar to startups. Another example - coming up with ideas for Godot tutorials by browsing popular tutorials made for other game engines (like Unity).

Copy what already works

If you're looking to create popular content, you can just find what already works well, and copy it.

Find the most popular blogs, subreddits, and youtube channels in your niche.

Browse their most popular posts and videos.

Use the Moz Link Explorer tool to find the most popular pages on a website.
Enter site:thewebsite.com into Reddit's search function and sort by top to find the most popular posts submitted to Reddit (and the communities where you can submit your own posts later on).
Sort youtube channel's videos (or the search results) by the number of views.

See if you can come up with your own take on these ideas, or do them better. Combine the best ideas and turns of phrase from multiple sources, add some insights they're missing, correct some mistakes and misconceptions they have.

Inaccessible Sources

Teach what you're learning from sources not easily accessible to others.

Invest in expensive high quality courses, and teach what you've learned from them.
Attend real-life courses and live events, take notes, and report what happened there.
Teach what you're learning from your school, bootcamp, or a university.
If you're bilingual - teach what you've learned from the resources available only in a different language.
Find interesting gems of information in unpopular, obscure, old, forgotten, boring, or controversial sources. Make them popular, accessible, easy to discover.

Summarize

Take large amounts of content and summarize them. For example - Paul Graham 101, a guy who has read all of the PG's essays and summarized them.

Answer Community Questions

Help people in online communities.

Find the popular communities in your niche. Go to Discord servers, subreddits, forums in your niche, StackExchange sites, and see what problems people are dealing with, look for frequently asked questions.

Answer their questions using your own expertise or research, and share your answers with your audience.

As a side benefit, this will help you to promote your content - you can always write down your answer as a blog post or create a video tutorial, and share it as a reply to the question - people will appreciate it.

You can also do an AMA. If you're doing something interesting - create "Ask me Anything" threads on subreddits or twitter, or encourage people to email you their questions. Share your best answers.

Answer Your Own Questions

Keep the list of your own questions you're confused about, things you would like to learn, concepts you don't understand, and the problems you're facing.

Make posts in communities, and ask people for help. Every time you find a solution - summarize the most useful replies, or explain what you figured out on your own.

Target the general audience

What aspects of the topic you're an expert in could you make interesting and accessible to a layman?

Share what you find interesting about those things, educate people, explain why these topics are important, get other people excited about them.

Once they're interested in your subject, you can explain to them how to get started with it:

Create content for beginners

Think about the difference between you now, and the version of yourself from 10 years ago. What are the most important things you'd like to tell yourself?

How would you help yourself to learn what you know now?
What are some things you wish you'd learn sooner?
What are some common mistakes and pitfalls you wish you could avoid?

Educate a different niche

Find a group of people who would benefit from the ideas in your field, who aren't already in your field. Make posts like "UI Design for Developers", "Sales for Developers", or "Math for Digital Artists", or "Social Skills for Engineers".

Build in public, devlogs

Work on something cool and share your progress. Game developers create devlogs about the projects they're working on, see if you can apply something like that to your own niche.

Behind the scenes

Do postmortems, retrospectives, share success stories.

Once you have finished a big project you're proud of - share what you've learned from it.
If your project has failed - share your mistakes.
Explain how you've managed to achieve some unusual result (made money with a simple project, grew your project quickly, found a life hack that improved your life, etc.)
Share any interesting or unexpected details that went into building your project.

Case Studies

Go on forums and offer people to give them feedback on their projects, articles, landing pages, portfolios, etc.

Create posts where you combine multiple case studies and show common patterns - what did these people do well, what kind of mistakes do they make.

Personal Experiments

Create "I did x for a month and here's what happened." type posts.

New, small, or rapidly evolving niches

Be on the cutting edge of rapidly evolving fields like webdev, gamedev, VR, AI, crypto, digital art, etc.

These fields change rapidly, new ideas, frameworks, and tools appear every month. You can research them, discover better ways to use them, or just help other people to stay up to date.

The new subjects often don't have a lot of content written about them (not much competition), and have a lot of interest and hype around them - perfect combination for creating popular content.

They also often have a lot of low-hanging-fruit ideas - ways you can contribute to the development of the field with your own original ideas and research (which you can also share).

All of the above also applies to novel or niche interests and weird hobbies, like sharing clever strategies for a new video game that just came out. Look for new cool things to be interested in, get excited about them, participate in small but passionate communities, share what you've discovered.

Keep the Snippets file

If you're a programmer or a technical writer - keep the file where you collect the useful code snippets.

Notice when you're googling the same subject multiple times, or finding yourself copy-pasting similar code over and over again. Organize the related snippets into a post.

List all the cool tricks and little hacks that may not be obvious to other people.

Artifacts and Assets

Share the things you've developed as a side effect of working on your projects. Share Figma design systems, models you've made for your game, pitch deck for your startup. Maybe even open source your code entirely.

Interview people

Find people who are more experienced or successful than you, send them cold emails or tweets, ask if they would like to do an interview and answer some questions.

This will be easier to do when your blog/channel/podcast becomes somewhat popular, because then you are offering people to share their ideas with a larger audience, which is more appealing.

While your audience is small - you can talk to your peers, bloggers, people you met on social media, anyone on your level who's worth learning from. Normal people often appreciate if you invite them to an interview and ask them questions about their area of expertise.

Analyze successful products (and people)

Take an already existing and successful product and explain how it's been made. Find people who are succeeding at some challenging task, and try to figure out how they're doing it, explain what makes them successful.

For example Every Frame a Painting makes video essays analyzing movies, Game Maker's Toolkit analyzes the mechanics of popular games, Charisma on Command explains what makes popular characters and celebrities charismatic.

Make Predictions

Do you have any useful insights about what will happen in several months or years? Register your predictions of things to come by writing about it, analyze the data, make an argument for your case.

As a side benefit this will help you to sharpen your prediction and decision making skills - you will be motivated to try to figure out in advance what will happen, and will be easily able to see and analyze your mistakes, improving your world model.

Industry news

Do a summary of the most important things that happened in your niche during the last week or month. New cool features in your game engine, new cool startups that have been launched, new research papers that have been published.

Some good examples - GameFromScratch makes videos about the news in gamedev industry, TwoMinutePapers summarizes the new and exciting AI research papers.

Useful Lists and Resources

Compile the lists of the best tools, books, courses, youtube channels, links, places to promote your startup, etc. Describe them briefly, make recommendations, explain why people should check them out. For example, my top godot youtube channels project.

Keyword Research

Use SEO keyword research tools or the auto-suggestions you get when you type something into a youtube search bar.

They will help you to understand what people are actively looking for, and help you to create content you know will be in demand.

Reviews

Review popular books, courses, products, tools. Create "X vs Y" posts where you compare two alternatives and share pros and cons of each.

Reactions

Keep an eye for things that are popular but incorrect, common mistakes, misconceptions, false beliefs.

Look for articles, books, or videos that you disagree with. Explain why they are wrong, make a good argument.

As a side benefit, this will encourage you to challenge your beliefs and look for good counter arguments. If they change your opinion - even better, explain why you used to have a false belief and share what you've learned.

Strong Opinions

Share strong opinions. Even if you invent an opinion for the sole sake of argument, boldly sharing a strong opinion is very useful to others. Those who were undecided or ambivalent can just adopt your stance, but those who disagree can solidify their stance by arguing against yours.

Thinking on Paper

When you have some question that confuses you or inspires your curiosity - write an essay about it. Try to organize your thoughts and come up with an answer as you go, use the process of writing to help you organize and clarify your thoughts.

Share more ideas

Did I miss anything? Share your approaches and strategies in the comments!

Invent the Future from the Future

lumenwrites — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 12:58:09 +0000

These are my key takeaways from “How to Invent the Future”, a brilliant lecture by Alan Kay at Startup School:

Focus not just on problem solving, but on problem finding. You can be sure that 95% of everything we do is wrong, inefficient, and will be changed in the future, but it’s hard to see that from now.

Instead of innovating out from the present, invent the future from the future. Imagine the world 30 years from now. Think “Wouldn’t it be ridiculous if we didn’t have this?”. Take this initial glimmer of an idea so far out that you don’t have to worry how you get there. Then bring it back closer to the present, identify an achievable and realistic step towards it.

Try to see technology of today as the punch card machines in the 70s, and try to replace them with Apple II.

Strive to really advance something very important. Something worth dedicating your life to. Pursue grand visions, not goals.

Because it is difficult, focus on milestones, not deadlines. Deadlines can be missed, and are hard to set up realistically when you’re doing something that’s never been done before. Milestones are inspiring to reach, and it’s more encouraging to go from one milestone to another in pursuit of a long term goal.

Don’t worry about having the perfect batting average. Total number of successes matters, not success/failure ratio. Failure is just overhead — an expected cost of trying to do hard things.

Value Arbitrage

lumenwrites — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 12:56:12 +0000

Value Arbitrage

This is an extremely useful idea that I've learned just recently. In finance, "arbitrage" means buying and selling things in different markets to take the advantage of difference in price. Like buying a toy in India for $15, and then selling it for $25 in the US.

Turns out, you can arbitrage not just products, but also information, knowledge, skill, or even human relationships.

For example, let's say you have met two amazing people who don't know each other. When you introduce them to each other, you generate a massive amount of value for both of them essentially out of nothing - you have given each of them a gift of knowing someone great.

Another example, is arbitraging information. Eliezer Yudkowsky have learned a lot about rationality and human biases from the books he has read, and then parlayed it into his blog, and later a Harry Potter fanfiction - and that has generated a huge amount of value to the people on the internet, who would never have been exposed to these ideas otherwise.

You can also arbitrage skills. That simply means applying good ideas you have learned in one field to a completely different one. I'm constantly applying the skills and ideas I've learned as a 3D artist to my programming process, and, surprisingly, the ideas I've learned from programming are making me a much better artist.

Finally, an unexpected idea that I have discovered, is that you can arbitrage fiction tropes. You can take a trope you have seen in one story, apply it to a completely different genre, and it will create a new and interesting idea. You can take a scifi trope and set it in a fantasy world, or you can take a plot structure from a dramatic tv show and use it in your comedy script.

Smart ideas are often universal. Learn a mental pattern in one field - and apply it elsewhere. Every time I have an epiphany in one of my crafts, I intentionally go through each of the other fields I'm interested in and apply it there. This has helped me to generate a lot of very interesting ideas.

Business advice for software developers

lumenwrites — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 12:52:50 +0000

Business advice for software developers

Today I want to share with you my favorite takeaways from an amazing Ask HN thread where technical founders have shared the most important things they have learned from building a business.

Understand your customers

Most companies fail because they build something no one wants.

Figure out who you are selling to and what problem you’re solving for them before you build anything. Forget the code, find the market first. Talk to your customers. Ideally, solve your own problem, but if you are not the target market - you need to find a domain expert who will join your team prior to the MVP creation.

Build an MVP

Build the smallest viable version of your product and test it as early as possible, get it in front of customers as quickly as you can, and get them to pay you.

Often all you need is a landing page to measure the interest. Create a static website describing the problem and the solution, add a signup form, drive traffic to it with Facebook or Google ads, see how many people will sign up.

Skip everything nonessential at the start. Focus on the key features that customers will pay for. It will feel broken, but it’s only broken if you can’t get any customers. When you find the right product formula and need to scale, you’ll probably need to refactor or rewrite large parts of it anyway.

Do things that don’t scale. Don’t future proof your MVP, just make it so you can validate that your product has a market.

Master marketing

Only 20–40% of running a successful software development business consists of developing software. A developer with marketing skills can build products and achieve revenues far in excess of their skill set.

A software developer with complete code and no customers is just a software developer. A business person with tons of customers and no software/product is in business.

Your brand, reputation, and intellectual property are 100x more valuable than any software or technical feat. Software and technical work is relatively cheap. It cannot be the basis of your business because someone can come in and clone your product after you’ve done the hard work of introducing an innovative product and establishing/educating the market. If another product has only half of your functionality, but more substantive marketing, it’s more than enough for them to win.

Do not be seduced by the technology

Customers don’t care about the shiny new tech, what matters is solving their problem. Often it is much easier to do with an old and proven technology, because new tech changes rapidly, is less stable, has fewer learning resources and developers.

Sometimes devs don’t realize that the hardest parts of starting and growing a business have nothing to do with code or the tech stack you choose. Marketing, getting and retaining customers and everything else in between is way harder than writing code.

Focus on your differentiation and competitive advantages, going stock with everything else.

Delegate

Your time is valuable, the time you spend doing a task is the time you can’t spend doing anything else. So focus on doing the things you’re best at, and outsource everything else.

Write a job application from yourself for each of the jobs your startup needs to get done. Contemplate why on earth you would ever hire yourself for the job.

Work out exactly what tasks there are in running your business that you are not an expert at, such as accounting, sales, copywriting, etc. and hire people to do those parts for you.

Set revenue targets

Plan for profitability, set goals, and be realistic about whether you are successfully accomplishing them. If you don’t, you might have built a good side project, but not a startup.

Aim to get your company to 10k USD monthly product revenue within three months after launch (that’s basically a limit of ramen profitability for a small team of 2–4, plus a little bit of extra to run the business).

If you can’t, then either the product, the target market, or the team needs to be revised drastically. This is a great way to frame the product launch by forcing you to ask hard questions about what you’re doing.

It’s also useful as a pricing yardstick early on. If you have very few customers, they need to be paying enough that you reach $10k almost immediately. If your product isn’t worth that much, then you need to scale out. It’s best to figure this out right from the start.

If it feels like you can’t do $10k MRR in three months on your own, then you need to find a cofounder who can do it together with you… So it’s a good way to calibrate cofounder expectations as well.

Other great points

Being good at talking to people and networking is important.
A good reputation and word-of-mouth is better than buying the #1 spot on Adwords.
Fire bad clients. They aren’t worth the stress, frustration, and opportunity cost.
Learn to say “no” to feature requests that don’t fit.
Don’t forget to take care of yourself. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Sleep, exercise, eat healthy food.
Be patient. It will take longer than you think.
Work on your process. Doing an hour of client works earns you one hour of revenue. Improving your agency processes can earn you a large multiple of that.
Figure out how to sell again and again to the same customers, otherwise you will have a high cost of customer acquisition.
Don’t let a single customer account for more than 10% of your revenue. If that customer leaves, you’ll be in a painful situation.
Banks will loan you money when you don’t need it and won’t loan money when you do need it. Apply for a loan or line of credit when you’re flush with cash in case of a rainy day.
Don’t hire too quickly. Payroll + benefits can eat through profits like crazy in a software business.
Build simple products that do one thing well.
Don’t take money from anyone who can’t afford to lose it
Don’t hire a ‘marketing’ firm. They will charge 10’s of thousands of dollars to ask you questions like ‘What do you think we should do?’ and then feed it back to you. If the product is positioned well with customers, you know more than the marketing company ever will.
Failures (at least small ones) are not a problem. Failing to recover is.
Start now, you’ll never feel ready. Just go, learn, and repeat. Action is king.