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Gratitude despite the odds
Joseph Brodsky, on being grateful
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,944 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Get Disciplined, Not Motivated
There's a lot of problems with simple motivation: Motivation is fleeting Motivation comes and goes however it wants. It might not last to the end of the week, end of the day, or even the end of blog post you just read. It's fleeting. Motivation is situational Motivation is based…
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Clinical trial finds blood-plasma infusions for Alzheimer’s safe, promising
In a small safety trial based on preclinical work by a Stanford researcher, participants receiving blood plasma infusions from young donors showed some evidence of improvement.
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Google taught me to turn Impostor Syndrome into an Advantage
My heart was racing. My palms sweating. I was going to be fired.\nPerformance reviews had just ended, and it was time to meet my manager and be told my results. Except I knew what it would say. How else do you rate a programmer who doesn’t code?
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March, 19-21: God is a comedian
A stiff drink is recommended
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How We Got Sal (KhanAcademy.org) His Dot Com
Update 6/22… It’s 12 years later and I just recently was able to get KhanAcademy.net and KhanAcademy.us to the folks at Khan Academy! It’s great to be able to support my favorite non-profits in a meaningful way. If you’re into domains and watching the drop, add a few of your favorite non-profits to your monitor list…
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ToothPaste
AES-256 Cross Platform Device Control.
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The Entrepreneur Who Captivated Me
On January 12th, 2012 I went to Airbnb to give a talk about Storm at their tech talk series. It wa...
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Nice Security Mindset Example
A real-world one-way function: Alice and Bob procure the same edition of the white pages book for a particular town, say Cambridge. For each letter Alice wants to encrypt, she finds a person in the book whose last name starts with this letter and uses his/her phone number as the encryption of that letter. To decrypt…
7901
Selling a Tiny Project
How I sold my tiny online store builder One Item Store, and how I think anyone can sell their tiny projects online.
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Let’s Not Have a Beer
For the first time, I won a major raffle at a recent conference. However, I had to give the prize back since it was a beer dispenser and I don’t drink. If your reaction after reading the last line was “Why don’t you drink?” or “Most of us do and it’s your choice that you missed out.”, then this blog is for you. I’m…
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Is work necessary?
I saw this bouncing around Facebook, and I would like to endorse the underlying philosophy:
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How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)
For two years I suffered from severe hand, wrist, and forearm pain while typing. After spending a lot of money on world-class medical professionals and ergonomic products but seeing poor results, I was ultimately able to cure all my pain by reading The Mindbody Prescription (TMP). Now I can type for as long as I want…
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When does an old iPhone become unsafe to use?
When Apple stops issuing security updates for older iPhones, they become unsafe to use. But exactly how long can you safely keep using an old iPhone, and when should you upgrade?
7906
Voting from Antarctica
How to vote back home while you're in Antarctica!
7907
Nobody is coming to save your career
I waited years for someone to invest in my career. Nobody came.
7908
Avoiding the Adjective Fallacy
You're reading this, so I'll assume your English is pretty good. What's wrong with these phrases? Do you have a logical reason for why they sound strange? Or…
7909
100+ reactions to 100+ solutions
“Many of us are grappling with OpenAI’s announcement on 6 October. We feel that it is useful to have an updating snapshot of the community’s gut feeling.”
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Be Worried
Author's note: I wrote this in March 2023, but just published in October 2025. I held back from publishing this originally for fear that I was being sensationalist. But with the launch of Sora 2, I couldn't not share these thoughts. I only regret I didn't publish it 2 years ago.
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The Slow Death of the Power User
There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read…
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A List of Open Questions
Misc thoughts, memories, proto-essays, musings, etc.
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All the Buns Are Blank
Damn! Remember when these buns had sesame seeds?
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My favourite German word
If creators of documentation are prepared to sacrifice its human purpose in order that LLMs can more effectively slurp it up and regurgitate it on demand, then they have meekly accepted values that more properly belong in a dystopian horror story.
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I'm not addicted to the internet or my smartphone. I'm addicted to information
At first, I thought I was addicted to internet forums. Then Facebook appeared and soon after I discovered Reddit, Hacker News, 9GAG, Instagram and other form...
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How I Deal with Harassment, Abuse, and Crazies in General
Whenever I write about a topic that upsets me, I calm myself by illustrating it with royalty-free, reassuring stock photos. "People are...
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Where Has the Magic Gone?
A big change that I’ve realised during undergrad is that engineering doesn’t feel ‘magical’ anymore.