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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 662 posts.
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Doing nothing at work
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they…
333
Dopamine Fracking
The act of pumping immense, disproportionate resources into a previously casual or complex and layered activity to forcefully extract and squeeze out the purest, most concentrated dopamine hit
334
Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felony
I spent ages 14-16 in a maximum-security juvenile prison, became a felon at 19, lost almost everything to addiction, and later rebuilt my life through software, open source, and a few people who took a chance on me. This is the condensed story, written for anyone wondering whether they have a future.
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Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)
I will never be a great snowboarder. For various genetic and non-genetic reasons, my knees are barely capable of surviving a three-hour hike, let alone the landing after a 1080. In fact, I’ll probably never be a snowboarder at all, given my orthopedist told me to stay away from anything that’s heavy on the knees, […]
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The intracies of modern camera lens repair (2024)
I stumbled across a broken Sigma 45mm f/2.8 Art lens for a very cool $58.65 USD that I simply could not resist. I've been eyeing an AF lens in the 50mm range for my recent endeavors with L-mount cameras and this looked like the perfect fit. This lens is commonly found as a kit with the very excellent full-frame Sigma…
337
Aging and Eye Problems
A weblog by ldstephens
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"Maybe later" was a feature
The most valueble code in my repo, is the code I didn't write.
339
Retro-Tech Parenting
I am a technologist. I enjoy the things that computers and digital devices can do–they often seem magical and amazing! As a technologist, I have a particular vantage point to see and be very uncomfortable with what companies are doing with that technology. There are catchphrases for these patterns: AdTech…
340
Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot
Tutorial for tying the Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot, in which the laces are formed into two loops, both of which are passed through the “hole” in the middle.
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My Software North Star
Loris Cro's Blog
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I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis
I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis . It is an autoimmune disorder where your body’s normally helpful antibodies start acting strangely . This leads to inflammation in the brain. This blog briefly discusses some of my experience and prognosis.
343
What I've learned about the trombone
Including a little dive into the physics behind it
344
I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
A brief explanation of my pessimism about efforts to radically improve education.
345
Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
Gmail's rapid descent into belittling their users, powered by AI.
346
Three Ways to Get Paid (2018)
What my father taught me.
347
Social Cache Busting
How do you ask questions that people don’t just hippopotamus?
348
Stop Ruining It
Paul McGowan makes stereos. To paraphrase his insight: The musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it. To expand: Customer delig…
349
The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI
How AI has changed the way I prototype, plan, and ship; and what I'm doing to keep my hands dirty.
350
The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don't want to maintain any of it. I accidentally run a news outlet which is surely a liability. Sure, it has helped me "learn AI tooling" and I use many of these tools, but I didn't need them. I can't afford to maintain any of them, not in terms of time…
351
What Is a Dickover?
dickover — a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of…
352
You can just say it
There is a weird collection of arguments for appraising the value of humans and their creative artifacts. It usually goes something like this: In the age of AI, we should still prefer humans in certain roles because AI could never perform the tasks required for that role. Or, a human can at least do it better. Or…
353
I am retiring from tech to live offline
AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails. I wish you all the best!
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We should be more tired than the model
Adding deliberate friction back into development
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Having your insulin pump die while you're on vacation
I'm about to tell you a story about the major disaster which affected much of my decisionmaking on my week-long vacation to Santa Fe. I just got home to LA, ...
357
I made my phone slow on purpose
I bought a brand new iPhone and immediately made it slow on purpose.
358
Can we have the day off?
So, apparently we are at the cusp of the entire world’s white collar workforce (and, by extension, much of the US workforce) undergoing a revolution in productivity. AI is the technology that is going to revolutionize the way we work, the way we interact with the world, the way we learn, the way we socialize, and all…
359
I analysed 20 years of my chats
Importing 1.2 million messages from Telegram, VK, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter into a structured Obsidian vault with local LLM inference - to measure how my friendships work with decay curves, vocabulary shifts, directional sentiment, and conflict rates.
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Warm up your MacBook (2019)
Who else hates putting their hands on an icy metal laptop after it's been riding outside in your cold backpack? Here's a one-line solution.