December 2021—In the book Antifragile, Nassim Taleb talks about the Lindy Effect. The observation that the older something non-perishable like ideas or practices get, the longer they will probably stick around in the future.
I liked this observation so much that I named LindyLearn after it. With all the cultural effects of technology disruption that we’re seeing now, I believe it’s critical to find more sustainable models for development.
And a different approach to re-invention from scratch and the obsession over the new gives you an advantage. Because humans change very slowly, you can reuse ideas.
One of the first things I built with the Lindy Effect in mind is Lindy HN. It’s a simple website that ranks all articles posted to Hacker News by the year they were written, and by how often they were re-posted.
The insight being that the more often articles get talked about, surely the more interesting they would be.
And indeed, this simple heuristic proves surprisingly useful if you’re looking for content that the (tech) community frequently refers to. Or when you’re looking for the most useful articles on any given blog.
However, regrettably, there’s still an aspect of newness on Lindy HN that seems to be required to make it engaging: the front page shows you the most recent re-posts of old content. Because discourse does seem to need urgency.
Febrary 2026—Note: sadly I had to take the website offline for now because the Firebase database was causing a lot of sudden usage costs, likely because of many AI crawlers visiting the site. But it still works on archive.org!
Maybe it could be refactored to using SQLite? Since the dataset of links is not very big (imagine — the best links of the internet fit within a few MB…)
