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ChatGPT Saved My Life (no, seriously, I'm writing this from the ER)
How using AI as a bridge when doctors aren't available can improve patient-to-doctor communications in real time emergencies
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 7,744 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Books are not too expensive
Let’s Explore a Little Math
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I miss using em dashes
I really miss using em dashes in my writing. Ever since content creators started using ChatGPT to help (or supplement) their writing, em dashes have become indicators of AI use. Students are routinely caught with their pants down as professors flag an essay as AI-generated based on the presence of lists…
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I finally found a use case for my Raspberry Pi Model B+
I take a severely underpowered computer and make it do something useful.
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Don't Be Frupid
Frupidity is stupid frugality that wrecks engineering teams. Misguided cost-cutting kills productivity, morale, and innovation. You can fight it.
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How to Afford Anything
Home Donate New Search Gallery Reviews How-To Books Links Workshops About Contact
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Design
I chose images from 1973 deliberately. It's easier to tell good design from bad when you're not looking at current fashions. (Try looking at the haircuts in an old high school yearbook.) Good design is timeless, and if you want something timeless you can't pander to the limitations of some hypothetical "average" user…
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What is the point of an online conference?
My experience of online conferences has mostly been underwhelming. They typically borrow the form and structure of an in-person conference without considering whether those still make sense online, and whether the goals of an online conference should even be the same as an in-person conference.
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The myth of the myth of learning styles
“Four different learning styles” has been debunked, but learners still have to learn how they learn, and choose the paths and materials that are right for them.
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Sane Thinking About Mental Health Problems
Epistemic status: exhortatory and personal, but pretty confidently my true belief CW: suicide mention When I was a teenager, I was depressed. And the way I thought mental illness worked, the way I…
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Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web
I just bought 3 domain names from GoDaddy. No, that is not news, the news is that I had to use a US based VPN before the purchase went through. (the VPN made the godaddy server think I was browsing from the US). The first 50 times I tried making
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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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Nailing jelly to a wall: is it possible? (2007)
We've all heard the old saying "it's like nailing jelly to a wall" to describe a task that is very difficult or impossible. But is our view of the difficulty of this task justified? Has anybody actually tried nailing jelly to a wall? In this experiment I attempt to establish, one way or the other, the validity of the…
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I Got Fired Last Week. That’s a Good Thing. Here’s Why
“We’d like to help you transition out of the company.” As the conversation progressed and reality sunk in, my ears slammed shut and blood streamed to my head. And since I neglected to bring a jacket for what I thought was … Continue reading →
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Can I take ducks home from the park?
16 queries and 6 language models
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So I lost my OpenBSD FDE password (2016)
The other day I set up a new OpenBSD instance with a nice RAID array, encrypted with Full Disk Encryption. And promptly proceeded to forget part of the passphrase.
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Writing a book for O'Reilly
Part One of a series on how I came to be writing for O’reilly, and what the process is like
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Boring work needs tension
We can make our work exciting by chasing the every day tension.
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The Programmer's Brain (2021)
by Felienne Hermans
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How to Be Jason Bourne: Multiple Passports, Swiss Banking, and Crossing Borders
Is it possible to become invisible without breaking the law? (Photo: gravitywave) LOS ANGELES, MID-JUNE 2008 Sitting on a plush couch in the neon-infused nightclub, I asked again: “What’s it about?” Neil Strauss glanced around and looked nervous, which I found strange. After all, we’d known each other for close to two…
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Things You Can Do That Will Make You Happier
Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. It's also no surprise that it's the Nr....
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Moving from Hey to Fastmail
A summary on my personal experience and how you can do it too!
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