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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 613 posts.
On the morning of 18th August, I got invited at short notice into a 1:1 meeting by my manager, which was unusual . I think I knew what was coming, and I was right: The company is restructuring, and I’m being let go (among a lot of other people). I had time until lunch to say my goodbyes to my colleagues as I would be…
The '90s-era digital camera metadata format, still useful in 2026.
I’ve just finished reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and was equally parts shocked and unsurprised by the events she witnessed at Facebook / Met...
Recently, a friend recommended BioGaia Prodentis to me. It is a DTC oral probiotic you can buy online that is supposedly good for oral health. I thought it would be interesting to do some sequencing to see what, if anything, it did to my oral microbiome.
Porting a 2012 OpenCV paper to YOLOv8 and CoreML on iOS to score rifle shooting targets from a photo - replacing the brass-plug scoring gauge with on-device computer vision.
Planetfall was yesterday's public release, but of course I've spent the past few weeks concentrating on Infidel. A couple of days I came across the most egregious bug I've yet seen in an Infocom game. This bug is extremely difficult to detect ...
Thoughts on an experiment that I've been running for about a month.
Chest fridge Using vertical doors in refrigeration devices is an act against the Nature of Cold Air. Understanding and cooperating with Nature rather than acting against it leads to much better efficiency. My chest fridge (Vestfrost freezer turned into a fridge) consumes about 0.1 kWh a day. It works only…
This is a little embarrassing to share, but I’d rather someone else be able to spot a dangerous scam before they fall for it. So, here goes. One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac …
two school nights, a pile of bootloops and one homemade rom later, my mother's phone is still e-waste. just faster
I spent 3 years building Unity games by copying tutorials and stitching forum scripts together. Then an interviewer asked me what Queue<T> was. I could not answer.
Stop re-learning things you've already figured out. Two simple ways to document any process, and find it again when you need it.
Coding in Rust and others; making coding videos.
White noise machines are widely used for sound masking, increasing privacy in offices and helping people sleep. The classic approach is a fan in a box, though in the past ten years people have mostly switched over to electronic ones. But a fan is really a great approach; you just need to put it to better use: have the…
My thoughts on the friendship recession and what I'm doing to maintain friendships.
An attempted improvement that only makes things worse. It is time we start naming this phenomenon in software engineering.
First we reinvented statistics. Then finance. Now we're reinventing program management and calling it agentic orchestration.
When I switched from an iMac to a Mac mini in late 2024 I choose an ASUS ProArt 5K PA27JCV (24", 60 Hz) for the monitor and while it looked great, it…
I'm Writing Again For those of you who are still here — and given how long it's been, "still here" is a real act of patience — thank you. I haven't written a column since 2022. Just like everyone else, I've been busy all this time on Artificial Intelligence, founding with two partners a company
...or welcome back! I’ve been silent for the last 7 years and now I’m trying to resurface with this new blog :-) Some of you might remember my previous work on Qubes OS1, a paranoid-security OS, which I started back in 2009, and led its development for the
If you take a scene from a horror movie and add funny music, the killer suddenly looks hilarious. Isn’t it strange that that happens?
I was very excited to get the latest version of my PCB from the manufacturer.
An aphasic space station monitors an anomalous object, while keeping the last two humans alive.
[2026-03-16 Mon 03:09] Since this might be prone to misinterpretation as an excuse to treat people rudely, a clarification is warranted. Being direct is not rude, and this style of communication assumes an established …
