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Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors
focusing after dark • corn cob bulbs • before + after photos • saving ½–2h/day • my setup • why don’t more people do this?! • FAQs
Ben Kuhn
Ben Kuhn's personal website.
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Visit benkuhn.net → RSS feedOn Hacker News Nov 2016 – Feb 2026
Career & Management 9Life, Learning & Writing 8Software Engineering 3Web & Frontend 2Society, Policy & Culture 2Tech Industry & Business 2
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Attention is your scarcest resource
how to ration your shower thoughts • care viscerally • monotask • evade obligations • timebox bullshit
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Wireless Is a Trap
Over and over again, I’ve seen people fix some wireless-related problem and go “wow, I had no idea how much better this could be!" • Wireless protocols often silently operate in an extremely degraded state that makes them substantially worse than wired equivalents.
4
Essays on programming I think about a lot
Computers can be understood • Choose Boring Technology • The Wrong Abstraction • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names • The Hiring Post • The Product-Minded Engineer • Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend • The Law of Leaky Abstractions • Reflections on software performance • Notes on…
5
Some mistakes I made as a new manager
the trough of zero dopamine • managing the wrong amount • procrastinating on hard questions • indefinitely deferring maintenance • angsting instead of asking
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You don’t need to work on hard problems (2020)
A lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life—probably because that’s the only thing they’ve ever been rewarded for so far.
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Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
thinking about scary things • examples from Wave • examples from elsewhere • finding a buddy • getting the timing right • a list of abyss questions
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Autocomplete as an Interface (2015)
the real reason zsh beats bash • how I got twice as fast in python • autocompleting all the things • maximizing user-interface bandwidth
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Syntax Highlighting Is Backwards (2018)
Most code editors color different pieces of your program in different ways. For instance, they’ll make keywords like if bold and bright so that you notice when you’ve misspelled them. They’ll make non-executable parts like comments and documentation fainter so that you know that the computer isn’t seeing that part of…
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Why squared error? (2014)
its computational convenience • connections to the Gaussian distribution • differentiability and basis independence • why not squared error • absolute-error methods
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Stock options are complicated
Most employees at startups get some of their pay in stock options. This is often framed to the employee as “you get x percentage of equity in the company.” Unfortunately, stock options are a lot more complex than true equity.
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The unreasonable effectiveness of one-on-ones
When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad. This was shortly after I’d started leading an engineering team at Wave, and so the “obvious” hypothesis to me was that the management (okay, “management”) one gets in graduate school is totally ineffective. Most graduate…
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Tips for immersive video calls
I spent way too long figuring out the how to make video calls feel natural. Here’s the best advice I came up with.
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To listen well, get curious
When I’ve listened the most effectively to people, it’s because I was intensely curious—I was trying to build a detailed, precise understanding of what was going on in their head.
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My favorite essays of life advice (2020)
Life is short • There is no speed limit • How to Be Successful • You and your research • Becoming a Magician • 95th percentile isn’t that good
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How I've run major projects (2025)
focus • maintain a detailed plan for victory • run a fast OODA loop • overcommunicate • break off subprojects • have fun • bonus content: my project management starter kit
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Grad school is worse for public health than STDs (2019)
(The way you can *really* tell something is horribly wrong is that grad students find PhD Comics darkly funny, not just dark.)
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What to care about in a job
In 2014, I wrote about how I chose my first job out of college. I’ve learned a lot in the 4 years since then—here’s how I would change my criteria if I were picking a job today.
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What happened to all the non-programmers? (2015)
As I looked around and realized for the hundredth time that I was surrounded by people exactly like me, something inside me snapped. I downloaded the latest American Community Survey microdata, fired up R and started calculating feverishly.