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Three ways to solve problems
Deciding not to solve a problem, or solving a different one, can also be a viable solution.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,937 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Coarse is better
Make AI weird again.
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Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): An incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy
Gather round the fire, everyone, and let me tell you a story. It has everything you could want in a Christmas blockbuster: superheroes and villains, a car crash, children singing, a mystery to solv…
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Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?
I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic. My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque…
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Prepare for That Stupid World
Prepare for That Stupid World par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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The port I couldn't ship
Porting a venerable library on vibes. What started as a quick WebPerl success spiraled into weeks of failed attempts, mangled ASCII diagrams, and a hard lesson about respecting the craft embedded in battle-tested code.
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Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
Link to: https://tidbits.com/2025/12/17/compromised-apple-gift-card-leads-to-apple-account-lockout/
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Slowness is a virtue
... at least when you're doing research, not development
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I program on the subway
Ever since moving to New York City, I've found my time to be in more demand than ever. Between work, meetups, and social events, I have noticeably less time for side projects than I had before moving here. At the same time, my commute is a massive time suck. It's 30 minutes each way, which doesn't sound that bad, but…
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This is not the future
I thought about this when reading a mastodon post which commented on a news where a project adopted a "use Generative AI but disclose it" policy, because it is "the future" and "people are going to use it anyway".
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Overconsumption is a spiritual problem
Overconsumption is a spiritual problem, not a money problem. Lessons about desire from "Spirited Away".
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I'm just having fun
programming isn't a competition
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The Bob Dylan concert for just one person
An interview with Fredrik Wikingsson, the subject of 'Experiment Ensam'
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The appropriate amount of effort is zero
Most people put too much effort into everything they do. Here’s a good example from Kristijan around tension in his hands when touching and holding things: Something clicked about inhibition and non-doing (in Alexander Technique), and the strongest effect has been a relaxation of my hands. Like I was touching...
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John Varley has died
. John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But...
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Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
Announcing my latest open-source project.
710
Bye, Mom
I get a text that my mom’s in the ICU.
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Recovering Anthony Bourdain's Li.st's
Loved reading through GReg TeChnoLogY Anthony Bourdain’s Lost Li.st’s and seeing the list of los...
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I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model
Yesterday I shared a little program called Mark V. Shaney Junior at github.com/susam/mvs . It is a minimal implementation of a Markov text generator inspired by the legendary Mark V. Shaney program from the 1980s. Mark V. Shaney was a synthetic Usenet user that posted messages to various newsgroups using text…
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“Are you the one?” is free money
One of my wife's guilty pleasures is reality TV, usually ones centred around dating - the more American, the better. By extension, I absorb some of this noise and I'm happy to admit I can sometimes get invested.
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What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?
One of the things I do when I'm feeling blue is to make a mental list of the nice things people have done for me over the years, including perfect strangers.
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Things I want to say to my boss
A new anonymous essay published every day in December in the countdown to Christmas.
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Craft software that makes people feel something
Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a programming language. I think it would actually be cool to write down how I feel.
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Developing a food-safe finish for my wooden spoons
You know what they say in the world of products: fast, cheap, good; pick two. That's exactly my experience when trying to find the most suitable wood finish for my hand carved wooden spoons and cups. I got tired of trying to find something food-safe, without chemical smells and that doesn't take ages to cure. So I…
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Getting into public speaking
Here are ten things I learnt about public speaking.
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We Need to Die
There's this genuine repulsion I feel when people talk about a future where death by old age is no longer a thing. Something very deep within me just says "no, absolutely not", and I've been trying to figure out why.
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So you want to speak at software conferences?
An article from dylanbeattie.net