451
Notes on San Marino
I spent three days in San Marino, a landlocked microstate completely surrounded by Italy. The people of San Marino are called the “Sammarinese.”
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 613 posts.
452
Shooting down ideas is not a skill
Criticism can prevent mistakes. It can never create value. Only ideas can do that. The two are not equal contributions, and most meetings get this backwards.
453
After Math
[This is a guest post by Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Silvia De Toffoli (University School …
454
Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?
How I massively over-engineered a trivial problem again because I just can't help myself
455
The Fedora 45 Sausage Factory
This is a walkthrough of how Fedora turns source code and packages into the artifacts you download and install. It follows the a package from a packager’s git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container images, and OSTree deployments.
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Emacs, how it all started for me
A presentation of why, and how, I started using Emacs
458
A Broken Heart
Or, getting a 100x speedup with one dumb line of code.
459
Daily Driving GrapheneOS
I've been running GrapheneOS on my Pixel Fold for over half a year now and can finally provide some experience on what it's like. Also, the official hardware partnership was announced!
460
I keep bouncing off the Scheme language
I have a huge appreciation for the Scheme programming language. I just seem to be unable to get it to stick in my head. This seems like a huge revelation for someone who named their blog after the Scheme textbook, but there it is. This post is the public admission I need to make, to...
461
Training my smartwatch to track intelligence
Training my watch to track intelligence
462
What Is Date:Italy?
Exploring the Date::ITALY Ruby constant, Julian day numbers, and the history of the Gregorian calendar switchover.
463
How Long Can Life Wait?
Just because you haven’t moved from the sofa doesn’t mean you’re dead.
464
An ode to houseplant programming (2025)
Waxing poetic about hyperlocal phytoid software development
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Synthesis is harder than analysis
Over the years, mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists have developed various calculi. If you have a background in computer science, you’ve likely heard of the lambda calculus, a m…
467
Neurons outside the brain
The three brains in our body
468
Why is Inkwell stuck in review
I submitted Inkwell for iOS to Apple for review on April 21st. It has gone through numerous rejections, code changes, resubmissions, clarifications, one phone call, and one appeal to the review board, which I’m still waiting to hear back on.
469
Social Cache Busting
How do you ask questions that people don’t just hippopotamus?
470
My old job feels distant now
I can hardly remember first experiencing ChatGPT. Its become so infused into my professional life, that going back to that first moment, or moments, is difficult. Instead a blur of a few moments. At some point, I realized it was a better Google. It was very similar to when Stackoverflow took off, and how Google search…
471
Jules Verne's Lost Novel
Jules Verne’s lost novel got the machines of 1960 right. He never imagined that Paris would keep its poets
472
What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?
EDIT: removed a couple of false positives based on comments from people. 2/04/2026: added a GitHub repository with data for this post
473
Pseudpocalypse
Here’s a conjecture: If you put any significant amount of text on the internet under different names, those identities can be linked using only the text itself.
474
The Ask
Coffee in hand, I sit down in the Cave. Any Tuesday during the work week, a sip, and I parse the calendar. 1:1 — he's fine. Status meeting — listen. Staff me
475
Superlogical
I authored 1 the announcement post on the Superlogical homepage , which describes the problem statement and what we're building. 2 Read that to learn more. This post is more of a personal statement about what led to this, how it relates to my recent work, and what comes next.
476
The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work"
One thing I've learned about paradoxes: often the answer to the riddle of "how can this one thing have such a contradictory set of features and effects?" is "it's not one thing, it's two things*."
477
Book review: Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?
Here are my thoughts on the free online textbook Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? by Paul E. McKenney, author of the Linux kernel’s RCU synchronization mechanism. I read a lot of this textbook, got my fill, and probably won’t read more of it in the near future so wanted to write this…
478
Video CDs Break Windows Explorer
There is an odd bug in Windows related to Video CDs . To reproduce it: Insert a Video CD (if you don't have one, you can download this fi...
479
Human Bottlenecks
Why AI won't augment human capabilities much.
480
I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor
Launch of an experiment to use AI-Scientists to accelerate research of a "solved" disease.