HN Explorer

Ask HN: Do you have more or less than 1Mb text of your own writing?

5 points by cwmoore ↗ HN
Of all that you have written in ypur lifetime, do you have in your possession more or less than 1Mb (180,000 words) of text?

Printed, blogged, work-related, personal diary, fiction practice, emails you personally wrote (not so much copies of boilerplate, or coauthoring when added for other reasons than actual written words).

Asking out of curiosity.

15 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 46.1 ms ] thread
KashifNY
Yes i do, i like to put down my thoughts in writing as well as planning out strategies and such as i found out that i could not find a pen when i needed it much which was a dilemma of mine and so i started just using my laptop and phone to jot down what came to mind and was worth recording
Bender
Some here probably have more than 1mb in comments. There's probably a way to calculate that through the API if someone were so inclined.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
dlcarrier
It doesn't take long to build up that many words on online forums, like Hacker News.
senordevnyc
Way way more. I write about that in journal entries alone per year
mikewarot
I've got 459,203 words posted here on HN alone, according to clickhouse

I'm currently ranked #495

https://serjaimelannister.github.io/hn-words/

I'm out of the labor pool with nothing but time until I age out. I also have strong minority opinions.

cwmoore
Sure, and thanks for the ranking context also. I think 1Mb is an interesting ballpark figure.
CM30
I haven't exactly counted it, but I'd say I've almost certainly have access to more than 1MB of my own writing. I've written articles about a variety of the topics for the last decade or two, posted far more on forums than is probably healthy, and have an untold number of my own emails in my inbox.
cwmoore
That's the kind of info I am interested in, thanks.
apothegm
Easily. I probably generate 180k words per quarter at work and another 180k for personal and social media purposes. Maybe 180k/month, even.
cwmoore
Thanks for the info. Wow, 9000 words per workday seems extraordinary.
apothegm
I might be off by a factor of 2 in that estimate, but not much more.

Most of our communication is via chat. Then there are ticket specs and comments. Project overviews and status updates. PR descriptions and comments. Documentation. ADRs. Retros and incident reports. Meeting agendas, notes, and writeups. The occasional email. LLM prompts. Last week I spent 5k words in a few hours just breaking down a large planned project to ticket-level bullet points so we could give an appropriate estimate for roadmapping. (Which turned out to be crucial, because it revealed that the requested timeline for a pilot was too short by at least a factor of 2 even for the most descoped version the stakeholders would accept, and we had the receipts to convince the CTO.)

I’m definitely not spending most of my days writing novels, but all the sentences add up.