The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,937 posts.
Throughout 2025, I spoke a few times about our home energy solution, including our grid usage, our solar array and our Tesla Powerwall batteries. Now that I have a full year of data, I wanted to take a look at exactly how everything is working out, and, in alignment with
almost all interactions are repeat games
When I switched from an iMac to a Mac mini in late 2024 I choose an ASUS ProArt 5K PA27JCV (24", 60 Hz) for the monitor and while it looked great, it…
I work as an Engineering Manager at Google, and my teams practice a simple habit - we book all meetings to start at five minutes past the hour (or half hour). This works better than trying to finish five minutes early. Meetings often don't finish on time, and the impact is highest with back-to-back meetings.…
How we learned to stop worrying and love writeable root filesystems.
After almost 18 years, I left iNaturalist, the product and organization I helped create. I left because I don’t believe the current Leadership team is pointing the product in the right direction, and I don’t think they are managing their talented staff in an empathetic or effective way. If you’d like me to continue…
I'm writing 30 posts in 30 days at Inkhaven. This is number 26.
I sometimes resort to a rather common measuring technique that is neither fast, nor accurate, nor recommended by any standards body and yet it hasn't failed me whenever I have had to use it. I will describe it here, though calling it a technique might be overselling it. Please do not use it for installing kitchen…
The home of Code & Visuals
I've been asking this question to myself a few times now. When ...
Recently, a friend recommended BioGaia Prodentis to me. It is a DTC oral probiotic you can buy online that is supposedly good for oral health. I thought it would be interesting to do some sequencing to see what, if anything, it did to my oral microbiome.
Since its inception on 2000-05-29, SQLite has been implemented in generic C. C was and continues to be the best language for implementing a software library like SQLite. There are no plans to recode SQLite in any other programming language at this time.
For years, I thought of Google as a trustworthy helper on the Web. Especially where it mattered most, removing pirated copies of my books from Google...
The Napoleon technique is a productivity technique that involves postponing dealing with something if it’s likely to get resolved without your immediate input.
When I was in my twenties I would hitchhike to work every day. I’d walk down three blocks to Route 22 in New Jersey, stick out my thumb and wait for a ride to work. Someone always picked me up. … Continue reading →
David's notes.
Hunting timeless insights into humans and software and helping others on the way.
People say “Comments should explain why, not what.” I feel like starting a flame war today so I’m going to argue that comments should explain ‘what’ too. Please don’t use this as justification to write bad code, okay? Okay. First of all, why shouldn’t comments explain ‘what’? If you need comments to explain what’s…
On a catchup call, I told my friend Nick Wignall how someone had trained an AI model to write blog posts in my style. It was a pure research exercise on their part. The idea was to train the tool on my past work, then give it the headlines and opening paragraphs of my 2025 […]
Think smaller–then act.
Who were the most popular personal bloggers of 2025, and what made them successful on Hacker News?
The meme will no longer be a dream.
Paper: This blog post has been expanded into a full paper: Scalable and Personalized Oral Assessments Using Voice AI (Panos Ipeirotis and...
My CTO leaned back in our 1-on-1 and said something that sounded almost threatening: "You want to get promoted? Try to take my position."
Despite these hard times, we continue our work saving the world from all manner of cyber-maliciousness. We adapt; we carry on. Meanwhile, I hope my travel notes and photos will bring a little cheeriness to all who view them – because there’s hardly a better way to do that than with the beauty of nature
I've been tracking my finances using Beancount in plain text files for 10 years. Here are the numbers, the workflow, and why I believe plaintext accounting will outlive any app.
Read about the new ebooks Standard Ebooks is releasing for Public Domain Day 2026!
Corgis, compute, Cold War; Ecclesiastes; ties; Stendhal; humor; Pascal's Wager; deep infrastructure; Germanic obedience; Texas State Fair
