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Preparing for missions in difficult places
Can I bring my emotional support dog?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,741 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
1712
Leave work slightly unfinished for easier flow the next day
A breakdown of 4 simple software engineering and coding habits that improved my productivity. These include keyboard shortcuts, learning to say no, reaching flow state faster, and keeping a big book of commands handy.
1713
I bricked my Christmas lights
Reverse engineering Bluetooth LE LED light controllers, or How I Bricked My Christmas Lights If a device communicates via Bluetooth LE and has an app, it deserves to be integrated into my home automation system. I’ve spent a significant amount of time reverse engineering various budget-friendly LED light strips to...
1714
Cognitive distortions that undermine clear thinking
Leaders are paid to think clearly. And a big impediment to clear thinking is what CBT/REBT calls Cognitive Distortions: errors in thinking or thinking traps we commonly fall for. Most high-performers are not pathological, but instead fall for them when upset or in high-stress situations. In this
1715
Chesterton's Fence: A lesson in second order thinking (2021)
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
1716
I Can't Sleep
I can't sleep. I'm lying in bed every night, and images of Gaza are running through my head. Fathers holding their babies, dead, caked in dust. Bombs dropped on homes [1], on hospitals [2], on schools [3]. Tens of thousands of dead [4] in indiscriminate bombings [5]. Children
1717
Remembering things that haven't happened yet
How will I know what I need to hear in a future I can't anticipate? Who will I be, and what will she want?
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Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
Then Life Continued
1720
Walk and Talk
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
1721
Forget spaceships; I just want my music
A couple weeks ago, as my kids settled into the car, I asked like I always do, "what songs do you want me to play?" They have a range of favored earworms, from Baby Shark to Babaloo, and usually the songs are tolerable, at least. But a few albums, like Bluey's soundtrack, transcend the children's genre. They're…
1722
Role-playing with AI will be a powerful tool for writers and educators
Or, how well can GPT-4 simulate an acid trip in 1963?
1723
Fixing Classical Cats: How I got tricked by 28-year-old defensive programming
Every now and then, when working on ScummVM’s Director engine, I run across a disc that charms me so much I just have to get it working right away....
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Gordon Freeman at the Olympic Games
Since the dawn of October 1st 2022 , the world has been plagued by the question:
1728
Crush Your Interviews with the Power of Storytelling
For interviews, it's not what you've done, it's how you explain what you've done. It's that fundamental difference which makes storytelling a critical interview skill.
1729
Inércia 2023
Filipe Cruz (aka psenough) invited me to Inércia 2023, a local Demoscene event organized by the Associação Inércia that took place in the infamous Incrível Almadense. I’ve done my fair share of bouncing ball assembly demos in the 80s and others more recently, but I don’t qualify as a demoscener, not even by the lowest…
1730
The Placeholder Girlfriend
It became real when I saw the list. When I saw the rubric.
1731
Not a real engineer (2019)
A short, dark prose poem on being told you are not a real engineer, and the monstrous thing you become instead.
1732
Code is run more than read
Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to identify problems and make decisions.
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My techno-optimism
Special thanks to Morgan Beller, Juan Benet, Eli Dourado, Karl Floersch, Sriram Krishnan, Nate Soares, Jaan Tallinn, Vincent Weisser, Balvi volunteers and others for feedback and review.
1735
Writing documentation for your house
Have you considered writing documentation for your house?
1736
My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
An adorable side project featuring SwiftUI, MapKit, and open-source APIs
1737
Robot Dad
See discussion of this post on Hacker News Tired of Alexa's feeble "here's what I found on wikianswerspam.com" responses to my eight-year-old son's science questions, I whipped up Robot Dad during...
1738
My favorite database shirts
Andy reviews his favorite NoSQL and NewSQL database shirts.
1739
My experience trying to write human-sounding articles using Claude AI
You can use AI tools like Claude to help you write full-length content. By going paragraph-by-paragraph, you can direct the AI while seemingly maintaining your own voice and ideas. However, despite my attempts to use AI with writing, I’ve found that it’s harder to pull off than I thought. I can get close, but due to…
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Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change
mood, memory, education; five easy wins for behaviour change