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Making Hard Things Easy
New talk: Making Hard Things Easy
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 913 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Cat-proofing a cat feeding machine
Furiosa’s Cat Feeder
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I quit the tech industry
This Friday, June 12, will be my last day at Yelp. I don’t intend to look for another tech job. Or another job at all. Ever.
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I am rich and have no idea what to do
Life has been a haze this last year. After selling my company, I find myself in the totally un-relatable position of never having to work again. Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way. I don’t have the same base desires driving me to make money or gain status. I have infinite freedom, yet I…
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Ask vs. Guess Culture
When unreasonable requests are followed up with "but you could have just said no!" Exploring the clashes of ask culture and guess culture, at home and at work.
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Bored People Quit
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't ha
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Life is not short
The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable.
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How to Understand Things
What we call intelligence is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about raw intellect.
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Investing for Geeks
A quick, opinionated guide to retirement planning and investing for software people.
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An updated daily front page of The New York Times as artwork on your wall
As a news junkie, tech journalist and founder of an online news platform called Blendle, I love a good old front page of a newspaper. When…
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Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times
I collect music by buying physical CDs, digitizing them with Exact Audio Copy , and scanning the artwork. This is sometimes challenging if the CD was self-published in a limited run in a foreign country ten years ago. It is very challenging if the CDs have an innate defect that renders some tracks unreadable.
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Biohacking Lite
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
I need to make a painful confession: somehow, LinkedIn has become an important social network to me. This isn’t necessarily due to LinkedIn’s sparkling competence, of course. To the contrary, LinkedIn is the Gerald Ford of social networks: the normal one that was left standing as the Richard Nixons and the Spiro…
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Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908)
From The World I Live In , by Helen Keller Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world....
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Sit.
Notes on mental health, motivation and Agile.
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Eight years today
The car in front of me kept hesitating. The driver couldn't seem to decide where to turn. Up ahead I could see that the light was green, but...
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Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness (2020)
Recently, I came across a few old and new interviews of Donald Knuth (sources: (i) Companion to the Papers of Donald Knuth , (ii) Interviews conducted by Lex Fridman Part 1 and Part 2 ), where he sheds light on his work habits, how he approaches problems, and his philosophy towards happiness. I really enjoyed reading…
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The revolt of the reader
Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life.
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MentalHealthError: an exception occurred
The programming community has been opening up over the past few years about mental health issues, so, I want to take this opportunity to open up about my...
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Useful Mental Models (2016)
These are some mental models I find useful. They’re rooted in decades of experience of thousands of experts – a modern equivalent of folk wisdom. Mental models are useful to quickly and correctly reason about seemingly intractable problems. They require quite a bit of intuition to properly internalize, but once you’ve…
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On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality
Self-experiment on whether changes in bedroom CO₂ levels affect sleep quality
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A three-page paper that shook philosophy, with lessons for software engineers
In 1963, the philosopher Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in the journal Analysis that quickly became a classic in the field. Epistemologists going back to the Greeks had debated what it meant to know something, and in the Enlightenment, a definition was settled upon: to know something is to have a…
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Warranty Void If Regenerated
Tom Hartmann had not planned to become a Software Mechanic.