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How blogging is different from tweeting
Over the last few years I’ve gradually given up on Twitter. This has been a long term process because of how deeply my professional and intellectual life was embedded into the service. Not on…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,741 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Revenge bedtime procrastination
Revenge bedtime procrastination occurs when people delay going to sleep in order to feel in control of their life and schedule. This phenomenon is particularly associated with people who feel that they have little time for themselves during the day, for example due to their work schedule, so they delay sleep until…
1744
Last Post, Please Read
Good morning. This is Zandar's Dad. I am sorry to tell you that he passed away over the weekend, peacefully in his sleep. Fortunately, his c...
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More people should write (2012)
More people should do what I’m doing right now. They should sit at their computers and bat the cursor around — write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about.
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The truth is always made of details
If you were instructed to draw a leaf, you might draw a green, vaguely eye-shaped thing with a stem. But when you study a real leaf, say an elm leaf, it’s got much more g...
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Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
‘NOVELIST LECTURER VANISHES’ announced a headline in The Sheffield Telegraph on Wednesday, June 26, 1963. ‘What has happened to Kathleen Sully, the writer who should have arrived in Sheffield yesterday to lecture at the Sheffield Arts Festival?’ the reporter asked. Sully, then at the height of her career, had been…
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The laptop that won't die
My $200, 12-year-old Thinkpad has outlasted two high-end Macbooks
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Archive your old projects
In this post I describe how I wish I had archived all my old projects and my approach going forward.
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Map of Space Invader Mosaics in Paris
The mosaics marked as flashed are stored locally. They are preserved between visits but not synced between devices. You can download and backup/restore them as needed.
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Nicotine (2016)
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
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How I got here
My name is Preston Thorpe, I'm 31 years old and I've spent just under 10 years of my life in Prison (all for non-violent drug crimes.) I am currently incarcerated at Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine. More importantly, far more importantly, I am a software developer, open source maintainer…
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I skipped to the ending
When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app…
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Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job
Last weekend I had a chance to talk with some students who just got their degree. They are pursuing their first software engineer job. In conversation with them, I learned that they have a pretty wrong perception of this job.
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Stop making every conversation about yourself
agree/disagree in a conversation
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Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol
When we finished the Potato Diet Community Trial, we found ourselves in a pickle. The diet worked — people lost 10.6 lbs on average over only four weeks — and we had basically no idea why. No idea …
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A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
Engineering, Robotics, AI, Technology
1759
When to Shut Up: A Visual Guide (With Included Algorithm)
Use these rules to avoid boring your audience
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A blog post is a long and complex search query to find people (2022)
When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media.
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No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
A reminder of how good we have it as software developers, or perhaps how hard it is for everyone else.
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Immanuel Kant – What can we know?
If you are interested in truth, be it in the form of scientific knowledge or artistic beauty, there is no way around Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. In this book Kant asked the simple…
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Current thoughts on social media
My view on the state of social media in late 2023
1764
Where do our atoms come from?
Falling down a rabbit hole
1765
What do we mean by "the foundations of mathematics"?
The phrase “foundations of mathematics” is bandied about frequently these days, but it’s clear that there is widespread confusion about what it means. Some say that a proof assistant must be based on a foundation of mathematics, and therefore that the foundations of mathematics refers to some sort of formal system…
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My rude-ass car
I need to vent about the impolite piece of yet-to-become e-waste on wheels that is my rude-ass car . You've heard versions of this story before, nothing is particularly novel in the shock department, enshittification is everywhere, etcetera... but I need the catharsis.
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Reflections on quitting my job
Programming lessons I’ve learnt over the last 7 years.
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The beauty of finished software
Let me introduce you to WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s. WordStar 4.0 As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it: It does everything I want a word…
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