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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 613 posts.
I'm an old Mac-head at heart, and I've been using Macs since the mid 1990s (the first Mac I used was an LC II with System 7.1 installed on it). I don't tend to think that the computing experience was better in the olden days — sure, there's a thing to be said about the simplicity of older software, but most of my…
Driven by curiosity, I decided to find out what the IndieWeb tag that kept showing up on some blogs and Mastodon toots was all about. I quickly…
Justin Bieber's "Sorry" is a song about regret, asking for forgiveness, and wanting another chance after having hurt someone. But philosophically speaking, what exactly makes an apology morally meaningful?
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 ...
I read somewhere recently, I forget where, that the purpose of people getting together for a conversation over a beer or coffee or lunch or dinner is that it the food and drink spare us from the burden of needing to have something to say throughout the whole conversation.
Despite these hard times, we continue our work saving the world from all manner of cyber-maliciousness. We adapt; we carry on. Meanwhile, I hope my travel notes and photos will bring a little cheeriness to all who view them – because there’s hardly a better way to do that than with the beauty of nature
What are we really doing?
On reading Terry Pratchett at sixteen, in the back of a French classroom, and a sentence that has been kicking over the furniture in my head ever since.
For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work.
Why controlling total luminance is a better bet
I became a citizen of Japan. Let me share about it. Some is my anecdotal experience, some my opinion, and some facts. Parsing which of these is what in each sentence is not going to happen. EDIT: I have seen some online reaction to this, and appreciate your kind comments. If you are thinking abou
A brief history of fish sauce, from Ancient Asian recipes, Roman times, and through to today's many (delicious) uses.
So… Here we are again. Today, after a minor disaster with my Obsidian vault, I decided to restore from Time Machine, and… I realized that it had silently ...
What my father taught me.
Matt Kirkland is a designer. He probably reads too much.
Do not apologize for replying late to my email par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
A blog about software craft and quality
My father passed recently, and he was twice my age. I am approximately the same age that he was when I was born, and I am now “the old generation” - there’s no one left in the generation above me.
On human connection after the Singularity.
I recently decided to, finally, have my iPhone fixed, only to realize a few hours later that my AppleCare could have covered it. I was in a low mood until my partner suggested that I was robbing myself of a good decision. The iPhone needed fixing, and procrastinating on it wasn’t useful. Deciding to do […]
I’ve been a lifelong reader, which has proved a fragile habit in our era of endless trivial distraction. While books and e-ink readers solve the problem of competition for attention, they can’t compete with a phone for convenience. That tiny device in my pocket has made reading both easier and more vulnerable to…
A week ago, I wrote about how Generative and Agentic AI may be amplifying what I’ve been calling cognitive debt: the accumulated gap between a system’s evolving structure and a team’s shared unders...
“We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper insight than it seems. Young people spend years in school learning the reverse: understanding happens before progress. That is the linear theory of innovation. So Isaac Newton comes up with his three laws of mechanics, and we get…
There’s something about restarting my Mac on a …
ex program, en farm
Paper: This blog post has been expanded into a full paper: Scalable and Personalized Oral Assessments Using Voice AI (Panos Ipeirotis and...
A bunch of reasons to write code in 2026
