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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
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How I Got my $3500 Camera Kit Stolen on KitSplit
Please read before renting out your own gear!
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Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
In my writing on technology and culture I try to be judicious about citing scientific studies. The issues involved in our ongoing wrangling with digital ... Read more
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When in doubt: hang up, look up, and call back
Many security-conscious people probably think they’d never fall for a phone-based phishing scam. But if your response to such a scam involves anything other than hanging up and calling back the entity that claims to be calling, you may be in for a rude awakening. Here’s how one security and tech-savvy reader got taken…
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It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)
It may not be possible for us to ever reach empirical definitions of "good code" or "clean code", which means that any one person's opinions about another person's opinions about "clean code" are necessarily highly subjective. I cannot review Robert C. Martin's 2008 book Clean Co...
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HN comments are underrated
HN comments are terrible . On any topic I’m informed about , the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong . Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect. Additionally, many comments are gratuitously…
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There is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format.
Also see Xiph.Org's new video, Digital Show & Tell , for detailed demonstrations of digital sampling in action on real equipment!
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Biohacking Lite
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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My product is my garden
I’ve been part of the internet startup scene for a while. There are so many different camps: the bootstrappers, the VC-backed tech-bros, the crypto “investor...
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Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
If you had the choice to sculpt a leg chair out of wood or write a full-fledged audio engine, complete with kernel drivers and whatnot, inside an app for controlling monitor brightness, what wou… Wait, no, that's not a question, you would do the leg chair for sure. There's no way that other thing makes sense.
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I've locked myself out of my digital life
Imagine… Last night, lightning struck our house and burned it down. I escaped wearing only my nightclothes. In an instant, everything was vaporised. Laptop? Cinders. Phone? Ashes. Home server? A smouldering wreck. Yubikey? A charred chunk of gristle. This presents something of a problem. In order to recover my digital…
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Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
I need to make a painful confession: somehow, LinkedIn has become an important social network to me. This isn’t necessarily due to LinkedIn’s sparkling competence, of course. To the contrary, LinkedIn is the Gerald Ford of social networks: the normal one that was left standing as the Richard Nixons and the Spiro…
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Most arguments are about ego, not ideas
I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected patches. I believed…
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How to win an argument with a toddler
You can’t. That’s because toddlers don’t understand what an argument is and aren’t interesting in having one. Toddlers (which includes defensive bureaucrats, bullies, flat e…
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There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)
An important announcement There Is No Antimemetics Division has been picked up for publication by Penguin Random House! Find out more here. Everything below is for the original self-published version of the story only. An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring p...
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Programming Still Sucks
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a…
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To get good, go after the metagame
What do metagames have to do with the acquisition of expertise?
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Null
I quite like to break things. While I’m not a QA or security professional, I have developed a knack for doing “stupid” things with software which causes it to malfunction. Some developer friends of mine have lamented that they didn’t show me software before they released it. Because I sometimes find annoying bugs…
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Men who stare at walls
I came across a video by Simple Lucas describing a routine to improve focus and productivity. The routine was basically: Don’t use any screens/entertainment when trying to focus on work. When you start to feel mentally drained, sit and stare at a wall for x minutes to recover focus. I’ve been trying it, and it’s a…
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The Shit Show
Well, it happened. We knew it was coming. A prick pulled the plug. And what bothers me most about it is how Phony Stark did it. My mom passed away just before Christmas. Her decline was something everyone in the family saw coming and we prepared for her demise. It still hurts like hell, but […]
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Palindrome Day 20200202
Sonstiges - Learn more about palindromic dates in 2020 and in the near future. 2020-02-02 (YYYMMDD) or 02.02.2020 (DDMMYYY) and others.
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Writing documentation for your house
Have you considered writing documentation for your house?
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Engineered Addictions
How silicon valley is putting a price tag on your attention - and relationships
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150 days of living and coding in a van
A developer on the road.
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