What I Learned Today
medium.com/what-i-learned-today · Group blog · on HN since 2013
A Medium publication of personal essays on productivity, creativity, careers, and lifestyle, including music, coffee, and weight loss.
What HN saysHN links it for productivity and lifestyle essays. One commenter saw a post reach 17k+ readers on Medium after an HN bump; another noticed a duplicated post.
92HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
99stories submitted
590story points
12 years agolast shared
2013people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Listen while you work: The magic of music and what it does to your brain.3 people · 4 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 2Coffee vs. beer: which drink makes you more creative?2 people · 62 points · first shared 2013 · 67 comments on HN
- 3Sell everything2 people · 39 points · first shared 2013 · 46 comments on HN
- 4How to get a job as a designer without going to design school2 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 5How To Be Happy2 people · 1 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 6How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how1 people · 154 points · first shared 2013 · 159 comments on HN
- 7I’m taking a break from my wife and kids1 people · 70 points · first shared 2013 · 32 comments on HN
- 8MBA builds app in less than 2 months1 people · 48 points · first shared 2013 · 46 comments on HN
- 9Side Project Hacks: Don't Sweat the Details1 people · 22 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Reasons Not to Pitch Your Startup to Techcrunch1 people · 21 points · first shared 2013 · 17 comments on HN
- 11Why You Should Care About Bitcoin1 people · 9 points · first shared 2013 · 4 comments on HN
- 12The Industry Is Unfair: What I learned from my last Jobhunt1 people · 5 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 13The noise of stuff1 people · 5 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 14Time1 people · 4 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 15Watch The Phone — What I Learned Today1 people · 4 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
spectre256 · 2014-01-03
Great article overall, but it seems to be a bit dismissive of music for productivity. It appears[1] the answer is a bit more nuanced: music is great for getting "in the zone" where you are mostly using existing knowledge to create something new. However, when you are really focusing on learning something new and difficult, silence is best.
Anecdotally this seems to match up with my experiences coding. Sometimes I'm more or less just churning out code, and music is great. If theres an ops crisis, or I'm trying out something new, music can hurt rather than help.
Edit, forgot the article:
[1] https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/be3172896a0f
marshallhaas · 2013-07-02
I published my first article on Medium over the weekend (https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/a27e01e84fac). It got it's first bump from HN, but 17k+ reads following was from Medium's readership. It also got featured on LifeHacker. I don't think they would have found it on my own blog.
Honestly, I didn't see any compelling reasons in that article not to use Medium. My post got it's initial bump from Hacker News, but then everything following has been due to Medium already having a built in readership. If I posted this to my own blog, sure HN would have driven the same amount of traffic. But I don't have a readership like Medium. There's something to be said about Medium's writing tools as well. I found myself enjoying writing again using their system. It's very clean and focused. Maybe I wouldn't have produced as good of an article without it.
jmduke · 2013-06-15
Slightly unrelated: this post seemed eerily familiar, so I googled the first sentence and realized why: it was posted on Medium, too. (https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/f7fcb3b786b1)
This is, I think, the chief issue with services like Posthaven, Medium, and Svbtle: by buying into the centralized platform, it means that you're putting your valuable content on some other service instead of using it to further your personal/corporate brand. The simple solution is to repost it, but that leads to the same issues GameFAQs faced with popular titles released on multiple platforms: when the network is split, the network effect weakens and the discourse suffers.
orn · 2013-06-07
His former post is interesting as well
https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/be8b2dc0677
guiambros · 2013-06-03
Here's a better and more thoughtful corollary post, covering some of the things that the OP left out:
Revisited: “The Facebook Experiment has failed.”
https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/f57f3bc8b377
OafTobark · 2013-12-26