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Bear turns 10, and it still feels like day one
🐻🎂 Happy 10th bearthday! Join us for the stories behind our design principles, the tiny details hidden all over the app, plus some wonderful new features and Bear swag.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,923 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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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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How to grow a cacao tree at home (2024)
Growing chocolate at home might sound like a wild idea, right? Chocolate originates from cacao trees, which demand a tropical climate, specific growing conditions, and several years to reach maturity in order to flower and fruit to produce cacao pods. However, our CocoTerra founder, Nate Saal, took on the challenge…
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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
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Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
White noise machines are widely used for sound masking, increasing privacy in offices and helping people sleep. The classic approach is a fan in a box, though in the past ten years people have mostly switched over to electronic ones. But a fan is really a great approach; you just need to put it to better use: have the…
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How is music possible
If you take a scene from a horror movie and add funny music, the killer suddenly looks hilarious. Isn’t it strange that that happens?
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Job loss and cortisone mania
On the morning of 18th August, I got invited at short notice into a 1:1 meeting by my manager, which was unusual . I think I knew what was coming, and I was right: The company is restructuring, and I’m being let go (among a lot of other people). I had time until lunch to say my goodbyes to my colleagues as I would be…
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This I Believe (1952)
I am not going to talk about religious beliefs but about matters so obvious that it has gone out of style to mention them. I believe in my neighbors. I know their faults, and I know that their virtues far outweigh their faults.
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How Japanese Dried Bonito Is Made
This workshop founded in 1882 still makes dried bonito like they did back in the Edo period. How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world’s har
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Most advice is right for the person giving it
Steve Jobs gave a famous speech at Stanford, where he told graduates that the only way to do great work is to love what you do, and that if you haven't found your passion yet, you should keep looking.
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What shall I teach my son?
Yesterday, the title The End of Education by Neil Postman called to me from my bookshelf, whispering that it might be the right book at the right time. It was. Published in 1995, it was surprisingly appropriate balm for the soul of a confused programmer and soon-to-be father.
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My Friend Bob Cringely
Bob Cringely died on Oct 3, 2026
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Chain of Thought for Humans
These past few weeks, I’ve been conducting interviews, and I often open with “make sure you articulate your thoughts out loud, so I can follow along with your thinking”. This is primarily because I…
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Code is clay now
Artisans, factories and the new material software is made of
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What Is Gridifcation
A 50-year comparison of Billboard’s top songs shows how recorded music became machine-perfect.
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The Brain Sandwich
The brain sandwich is a practical AI coding workflow: understand the problem, let an agent help, then verify and explain its work before sharing it.