1921
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,937 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
1922
Traveling the World on a Third World Passport
Travel the world with a third-world passport: Embrace the unfairness and overcome limitations. Here's how I traveled the world with a Thai passport.
1923
Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech
Articles about systems, programming, and software engineering management written by Evan Meagher
1924
Takkyu-bin: Luggage forwarding in Japan
Please don't roll your big bags around town
1925
1926
What I Learned From Fixing my Laptop's Motherboard
A month ago I managed to break my laptop, by reversing the polarity of a universal power supply. The repair shop diagnosed the problem as a failed motherboard, and asked for €659 to replace it. I found the price preposterous and the notion of throwing away a motherboard for a single failed component ecologically…
1927
My next Mac might be the last
Why keep investing in a platform that's been disappointing me for a while?
1928
No one cared about my spreadsheets
The most painful part of writing The Case Against Education was calculating the return to education. I spent fifteen months working on the spreadsheets. I came up with the baseline case, did scores of “variations on a theme,” noticed a small mistake or blind alley, then started over. Several programmer friends advised…
1929
Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks
Tim Ferriss Intro Hundreds of people have asked me about Soylent, a controversial Silicon Valley team trying to replace food with a grayish liquid. “Does it really deliver all the nutrients the human body needs?” “Is it safe?” “Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?” [Hint: they have] And most often: “What do you think…
1930
1931
Does creatine make you smarter?
And why does the brain use creatine anyway?
1932
1933
1934
Bird brains (2023)
A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.
1935
1936
Build stuff
Extending on the about page, I want to emphasise even more the importance of creating personal projects, having independent work and going far beyond what a degree might teach you. Just so that we are on the same page, I will not take into consideration the reason for choosing a Computer Science degree, nor the money…
1937
Life in a Studio Apartment with My Wife and Two Sons
Between July 2011 and August 2015 I lived in a ~400sqft studio apartment in San Francisco. I moved in a bachelor but by the time I moved out, I was one member of a four person family. Here are some things I learned along the way. Lesson 1) Rent control has strange side effects San Francisco has a rent control policy…
1938
Why am I interested in Elixir?
I’ve had Elixir on the brain recently. And by recently I probably mean 2 years. In my defense I think it is fair to say it is blooming right now. I haven’t had much need of it, or opportunity for it, in my day-to-day of maintaining a Python legacy system, renewing another legacy or optimizing Elasticsearch. So I’ve…
1939
I'm turning 30 and I've produced no amazing art.
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1940
Using an engineering notebook
One of my core software engineering practices is writing, by hand, in a physical notebook [1] . It's one of the most important things I do to remain productive and effective. Maybe the single most important. And it's a practice that I see very few others using!
1941
Forget Twitter Threads; Write a Blog Post Instead
All of the kool kids in Twitter land seem to be jumping on the bandwagon of a very annoying craze. Twitter threads. Please stop; write a blog post instead
1942
Thank HN: Our friend is Safe and Sound
Two weeks ago to the day I asked for your help in finding a lawyer for a HN’er that was about to be arraigned in front of a Delhi judge.
1943
The last time my family was replaced by technology
My great-great-grandfather thought he’d be replaced by technology too. He was a farrier in Mandres-en-Barrois, the small village in rural France where I grew up.
1944
Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022
In late 2021, I had solar panels installed onto the roof of my house. After some bureaucratic delays, the solar panels began producing electricity for me at the beginning of January 2022. I have been tracking the performance of the panels for the last year in order to assess what the financial impact of the panels is…
1945
1946
1947
5 Years of Pop _OS
Five years. Can you believe it? To celebrate, we’re looking back at where Pop!_OS started, how it’s grown, and where it’s going next. Thanks for joining us on this journey!
1948
The Reality of Developer Burnout
Burnout is, unfortunately, a very real phenomenon in software development — especially when creating and maintaining open source projects with large numbers...
1949
EmacsConf 2024 Notes
The videos have been uploaded , thank-you notes have been sent, and the kiddo has decided to play a little Minecraft on her own, so now I get to write some quick notes on EmacsConf 2024 .
1950
Life lessons learned in travelling the world for 8 years straight
Benny Lewis revisits 29 life lessons from eight years of travel, covering language, friendship, money, mistakes, culture and connection.