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Locating the source of a mysterious beep
Our house has a box room, full of boxes that we still haven’t unpacked from our last move. A couple of weeks ago something in that room started intermittently beeping. …
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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I saw your HN comment
I used to love getting emails from people in response to things I’ve written online, blog posts or Hacker News comments, but in the last 2 years it’s changed from mostly signal to mostly noise. I’ve …
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How I'm fighting the AI brain fry
If you work with Claude Code or Codex from the terminal, you know this one.
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Person of Interest
A few days ago, I started watching Person of Interest, and I haven’t been able to stop. Aside from the fact that the show feels even more relevant today than...
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Petered
We’re looking in the wrong place for the imposters among us.
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Writing as a thinking tool
In middle school I could not get through long passages no matter how hard I tried. I would read an entire page and find that nothing had reg...
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Goodbye Claude, hello Pi
I’ve been a longtime Claude Code user, ever since it became available in the Claude Pro subscription plan over a year ago. I remember the first time I used it, feeling giddy as it spat out messy Python code for whatever random weekend project I was working on, all from a single prompt. I’m certain that in a few years…
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Five memorable books about programming (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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How Long Can Life Wait?
Just because you haven’t moved from the sofa doesn’t mean you’re dead.
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Terry Pratchett's Study
This is not a replica of Terry Pratchett’s study. To do that, I would have needed pictures from every angle and exact measurements, so this is just a small part of a study, where Terry Pratchett might have felt at home, in scale 1:12. If you read “The Borrowers" as…
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Notes on San Marino
I spent three days in San Marino, a landlocked microstate completely surrounded by Italy. The people of San Marino are called the “Sammarinese.”
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Porting Android 16 to my blind mother's keypad phone
two school nights, a pile of bootloops and one homemade rom later, my mother's phone is still e-waste. just faster
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ToothPaste
AES-256 Cross Platform Device Control.
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TextEdit vs. Pages
Allison Sheridan is right when she says TextEdit can usually do the job. But I'm sticking with Pages anyway.
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My Favourite Laptop
I’m not a big owner of things, but the best laptop I’ve ever owned is a roughed-up 2015 Thinkpad X250.
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Curiosity Traps
On reverse honeypots, rewarding close attention, and finding your people
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Novellas with Groff
Don't even think about it: I won't publish this. Nor send it to you privately, which is mostly the same as publishing it.
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Resisting Cognitive Surrender
Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas. Home . Site Map . Subscribe . More at expLog . — Kunal
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The Duty of a Scholar
There was a joke at the time that although the National Security Agency had opened up in recent years and started taking their defensive role more seriously, the one aspect of cryptography which they would never discuss publicly was side channel attacks — and this itself constituted a side channel, revealing the…
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Digital minimalism
For a long time I have been a fan of minimalism in my physical life: have few physical possessions, and try to do more with less. Four years ago, I wrote this blog post describing what I had in the 40-liter backpack that I travel around with.
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Jules Verne's Lost Novel
Jules Verne’s lost novel got the machines of 1960 right. He never imagined that Paris would keep its poets
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We won't "just hang out"
On human connection after the Singularity.
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A Health Update
I’m writing this post from a hospital bed. And I couldn’t be happier. You hear folks say chemotherapy sucks, but until you go through it yourself, you don’t really know how bad it can be. It remains a popular activity only because it’s better than the alternative. My first exposure to chemotherapy was with this […]
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Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I have a spicily optimistic take: I think there's a huge opportunity for junior engineers.
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Here be monsters: What do you still need to know when agents do the work?
AI agents write code faster than anyone can read it. What engineers still need: fundamentals, breadth, and the willingness to dive in when it breaks.
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A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny ...
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Why I Am a Programmer
There they sit, the preschooler class encircling their mentor, the substitute teacher.
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The Importance of Limitations for Creativity and Learning (2023)
The other day, my kids started messing around (at home) with an online document writing platform their school uses. They’d discovered a fun little easter egg. I watched them laugh and play with the feature - pushing its limits and ultimately crashing the browser.
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The Curse of Soldered RAM
The trend for soldered on RAM in modern laptops is truely evil especially in these current trying times of shortage induced high prices. I normally run 2 laptops, one for personal stuff and one for…
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We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970
Somehow a film made 56 years ago named Colossus The Forbin Project predicted the world of today