481
A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
Ursula K. Le Guin on the presence of technology in her work
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 613 posts.
482
Don't Use AI to Write
Writing requires thinking, don't let an AI do the thinking for you.
483
Ten lines of code that changed my world
Front-end antics and typographic mischievousness
484
Buy Your Friends Batteries
Pool your money and give your friends batteries that lower their electricity bills and keep essential devices running during outages.
485
What the fuck happened to nerds
I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends...
486
The View from RSS
What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds.
487
A portentous reunion
I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.
488
The Duty of a Scholar
There was a joke at the time that although the National Security Agency had opened up in recent years and started taking their defensive role more seriously, the one aspect of cryptography which they would never discuss publicly was side channel attacks — and this itself constituted a side channel, revealing the…
489
How to buy a good car for $1000
Elite circles have their own cultural knowledge. So does the bottom 40%. Here's some of mine.
490
A greyscale iPhone setup that works in everyday life
I'm driven by the belief that we must not sacrifice our humanness for technology.
491
Software, from First Principles
How electrons flowing through billions of microscopic switches etched into silicon become arithmetic, memory, and the software you use every day.
492
I'm tired of being on the network
You can tell how tired someone is of the always-online life pretty easily. When they get home, watch the distance between the phone and the body. The people who love being connected never let the thing leave them be it pocket, palm, face-down next to the fork. Everyone
493
Good people refuse to do bad things
On the responsibility of engineers
494
Code is run more than read (2023)
Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to identify problems and make decisions.
495
Five memorable books about programming (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
496
Chain of Thought for Humans
These past few weeks, I’ve been conducting interviews, and I often open with “make sure you articulate your thoughts out loud, so I can follow along with your thinking”. This is primarily because I…
497
LLMs predict my coffee
Why not benchmark with physical experiments?
498
The future of independence is interdependence
Every one of us depends on others; the only difference is how visible that dependence is.
499
So you want to write an “app” (2025)
I touched "every" OS so you don't have to
500
Let's Get Physical
This week has been… eventful. And when I say eventful, I can say this has been the funniest pentest I have ever been on in my life. Let me tell you about it!
501
Bye Bye Gmail
TLDR: Please remove @gmail.com as my primary email address and substitute removed . I will try to respond to email sent to @gmail.com but no guarantees.
502
Books are not too expensive
Let’s Explore a Little Math
503
Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
If you often get static electricity shocks when touching your laptop or your office chair, or your monitor goes black when you stand up, this may interest you.
504
Rules of good social skills (2025)
Yesterday, I timeboxed 45 minutes to write down every single rule of good social skills I could come up with, wrote a tweet thread, then it went somewhat viral !
505
In Memoriam: John W. Addison, my PhD advisor
John Addison (1930–2025) died March 7, 2025, at the age of 95. He was my PhD advisor at UC Berkeley, and I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have worked under his guidance. My condolences go ou…
506
Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
I just finished Oliver Sacks’ excellent Everything in Its Place. In it, he mentioned as an aside that the Ginkgo biloba tree is hundreds of millions of years old, and its phenotype has been practically frozen since then – a living fossil.
507
Warm up your MacBook (2019)
Who else hates putting their hands on an icy metal laptop after it's been riding outside in your cold backpack? Here's a one-line solution.
508
What is happening to writing? Cognitive debt, Claude Code, the space around AI
"Cognitive debt," Claude Code, and the negative space around AI
509
I don't enjoy the Internet any more
The pale is growing
510
I switched from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook
Documenting my journey switching away from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14