Michael Lynch

@mtlynch

Bootstrapped founder. Lover of unit tests. One successful exit. ex-@google, ex-@microsoft.

184 Folgt854 Follower274 Posts

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Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir mtlynch.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· May 13

Darn! Forgot to take this bet.

Hacker News comment from May 10, 2026: "But you know, I'm willing to bet that in 10 years from now WhatsApp and Slack will be both dead..."

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· May 6

I bought parts for my last PC on Black Friday 2024. I bought 64 GB of RAM for $209.99. Price today for the same exact sticks: $979.99

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Apr 30

AI has good suggestions for bad writing but bad suggestions for good writing.

AI can help you become a good writer, not a great writer

AI can be improve your writing, but it's important to recognize its limitations.

AI can't accurately predict the responses of real readers. AI has seen many examples of good writing, and it does an impressive job at pattern matching your writing to other examples, but you know your readers better than AI does.

As an experiment, I asked an AI agent to offer feedback on a recent essay written by Paul Graham, a popular and influential software writer. Here was the AI assistant's first note:

> “An essay has to tell people something they don't already know” may feel too rigid. [...]
>
> A softer version might be:
>
> - “A good essay usually tells readers something they didn't already fully know.”
> - “An essay has to add something to the reader's understanding.”

The AI's feedback is basically, “You have a strong point of view. Why don't you water it down?”

The feedback for Graham's essay is typical of AI. An AI assistant does not want to adopt bold stances or take risks. AI wants to sound like everyone else.

If Paul Graham let an AI assistant revise all of his writing, he would not be popular or interesting because AI would filter the exact qualities that make Graham stand out.

AI can help you reach the 60th or 70th percentile of writing ability, but not beyond. An AI assistant will never say, “Gosh, that's better than I can write, so I'll leave it alone.” If you show it 90th percentile writing, AI will drag it to the 70th percentile with needless edits.

To grow beyond AI's limitations, you need to follow your intuition. If AI tells you to change something, think carefully about whether the AI assistant “gets” what you're trying to do and whether you agree with its feedback.

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Apr 19

I teach writing to developers, and I use your WannaCry blog post as an example of effective storytelling despite superficial writing issues

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Feb 25

Me, two days after discovering I can purchase remote nix builds as a service

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Feb 10

I'm on Hacker News today! I wrote about my eighth year as a bootstrapped founder.

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Jan 12

Keri Russell's face acting in this scene alone brings the season up to a minimum of three stars

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Jan 12

@jmduke.com can you update your site's repo so I can submit a PR to fix this *egregious* bug in your review of The Diplomat?

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Jan 7

Looks like my fix worked

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Jan 6

Oh, they're indexing every possible view of the HN popularity contest

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Jan 6

Got a notification that I was using 600x my normal CDN credits. I checked it expecting an aggressive LLM scraper. But nope, just Google, downloading the same 3 MB file from me every three seconds.

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Jan 3

My article about the HN's top bloggers of 2025 is on the front page of HN. Honestly, I'm quite relieved after it flopped yesterday. I don't mind pandering to HN, but it's embarrassing when even that fails.

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Jan 2

You were at #1 for a while!

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Dec 29

Yeah, I don't know what could have originated this wild rumor

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Dec 18

I just added discounted regional pricing based on purchasing power parity for my book. You can pay in your local currency based on your PPP. refactoringenglish.com/early-access/

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Nov 14

They feel like they mean something, but when you delete them, the sentence is no different.

For example, these two sentences differ slightly:
I discovered a very useful feature of Linux.
I discovered a useful feature of Linux.
The difference in meaning above is so small that it’s easy to delete “very” for brevity. The
same is true with similarly bland modifiers like “really,” “pretty,” and “much”:
The code feels much cleaner now that we have consistent conventions.
The code feels cleaner now that we have consistent conventions.
We’ve had really promising results with SQLite.
We’ve had promising results with SQLite.

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Nov 14

One of the simplest ways I've improved my writing is deleting words like "very" and "much" that add virtually no meaning.

I refer to the following words as "`easy deletes,`" as they rarely add enough value in any sentence to justify their existence:

* very
* really
* pretty
* much
* just
* actually
* own

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Oct 1

This appeared on a web payment form I was filling out. For a second, I thought, "Wait, how are they getting my desktop's local LAN IP?" And then I realized they're just logging their reverse proxy's IP.

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Sep 12

I interviewed Adam Gordon Bell, blogger and host of the CoRecursive podcast about how he consistently reaches the front page of Hacker News, what blog post topics attract customers, and how Adam improved his writing refactoringenglish.com/blog/intervi...

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Sep 8

New achievement: I repaired a CPU with bent pins! I bought a used AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU for my home NAS because my old Athlon 3000G was choking on 4K video. The new CPU arrived with bent pins. Thought about returning it but managed to repair it myself with a utility blade.

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Jul 9

A quote from Refactoring English made it to LWN's development quote of the week. lwn.net/Articles/102...

A release announcement should never include the phrase, "various improvements and bugfixes." You might as well boast that the team proudly breathed air throughout development and used the latest version of the Internet.

If you can't articulate how a change benefits your users, don't highlight it in your release announcement. Save the exhaustive list of changes for your release notes, but even there, please leave out "various improvements and bugfixes."

— Michael Lynch

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Jun 16

Based on this CO2 graph, can you guess the point in the weekend I was playing with dry ice?

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Jun 2

One of my favorite pieces of advice about writing educational books and products comes from Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick.

In fact, it’s so rare for a book to deliver on its promise that readers will adore
you for doing just that one thing. I’ve heard plenty of people recommend a
messy-but-effective book by saying:
Listen, it’s terribly written and full of typos and has a cover that
appears to have been drawn by a distracted toddler, but it’s got
something inside that’s just too important to miss. It’s going to
change your life. You’ve got to read it. Trust me.
But I’ve never heard even a single person recommend a problem-solver with the
inverse argument of:
This book is a real zero-impact way to spend thirteen dollars and
three hours. But you can tell that the author is super smart, the
cover is gorgeous, and there’s not even a single typo. You’re going to
love it.

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· May 25

It actually decayed off yesterday but the moderators seem to have bumped it back up around 9 AM ET this morning

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· May 1

I'm now famous enough that people remember vague, disconnected details about me

Litestream is really cool! I'm planning to use it to backup and restore my SQLite in the container level, just like what that ex-google guy who started a startup of a small KVM and had a flood in his warehouse while on vacation did. If I'm not mistaken. I would link here the perfect guide he wrote but there's 0 chance I'll find it. If you understand the reference please post the link.

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Apr 4

My DIY book cover vs. a professional designer's version.

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Apr 4

I played around more with the Hacker News Popularity Contest site and now you can view stats for your domain. refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-pop...

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Apr 3

What's the angle here? In two days, I got two different PRs on my open-source projects from two distinct but mostly fresh Github accounts adding Traefik as a layer in front of my app. The style of writing and code seem very AI-generated.

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Mar 29

Kickstarter goal met! I get to write this book! Thanks so much to everyone who contributed!

Screenshot showing Kickstarter project at 105% funded

Michael Lynch@mtlynch· Mar 28

My blog post about writing blog posts that appeal to Hacker News is on the front page of Hacker News