Apparently I can spend many, many words expanding on things!

I just looked it up, and apparently War and Peace is about 590,000 words. A book that is a joke in every 90's cartoon as something "really heavy to drop on someone's head", and apparently I've written almost that much arguing with people on a programmers forum.

I've been on here for about 10.5 years, so averaging about 48,515 per year. My favorite book is The Go Between by LP Hartley, and that's 98,621 words [1], so I'm basically writing the equivalent of about half of my favorite novel every year.

So it's a bit weird to me. A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.

[1] https://howlongtoread.com/books/779942/The-GoBetween

> So it's a bit weird to me. A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.

A bit anecdotally but when I built this website (and this is something that I commented to another commentor in here but wanted to share it again),is that I had the same weird feeling you can say (although to write blogs instead)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46828331

"I guess I can write it but I already write like this in HN. The procastination of writing specifically in a blog is something which hits me.

Is it just me or is it someone else too? Because on HN I can literally write like novels (or I may have genuinely written enough characters of a novel here, I might have to test it or something lol, got a cool idea right now to measure how many novels a person has written from just their username, time to code it)"

I literally got the idea comparing that I may have written some novel (0.66 of GOT here :) quite a lot less than you but still)

Personally, I like to think that HN definitely helped me with grammar and definitely lots of aspects & also you don't have to think of it as an if-else.

You know how to put in the efforts of writing! You have written 5,09,412 words (just searched through it) and I feel like somewhere my point is that you are capable of writing. You know how to put in the efforts within writing & I feel as if, if writing novels is something that interests you (as I remember your novel idea from another comment you have written here :]) . You are definitely capable of writing & I really suggest for you to go through it and have the confidence to do such!

Good luck writing my friend! :]

> I just looked it up, and apparently War and Peace is about 590,000 words. A book that is a joke in every 90's cartoon as something "really heavy to drop on someone's head", and apparently I've written almost that much arguing with people on a programmers forum.

To be honest, I find it funny how people from outside programming (who might not know programming so much) think that its all the same but in reality we see the amount of nuance through such forums. I really found it funny to think upon.

And to be honest, the things which we argue, where I feel like we expose each other to new nuanced opinions & solidify our opinions by some evidence etc. is something which I really appreciate.

I use Hackernews a bit differently where I use it as a way to expose to new github projects (usually) & I found the ability to find Open source projects (or create when there are none, this project's MIT licensed also I wouldn't call myself author now thinking about it given that I essentially used LLM to write it so time to redact saying I am author or similar xD)

But my point is, that I have found so many great open source projects & communicated with many interesting people which would've been hard to do so without this forum so a bit feeling greatful for this community! Thanks Hackernews <3 (Much love)